Rich Jordan wrote:

> It was the government weaseling out of the POSIX and OSI mandates that
> pulled the rug out from under DEC and the other folks that had
> bothered to implement it.


I am not sure "weaseling" is the correct word. TCPIP grew phenomenally
because all of a sudden, Unix started to be taken seriously. (Sun may
have had a lot to do with it, stealing DEC customers and moving them to
TCPIP based Unix).

I think that the US government maintained the OSI mandate long enough
for DEC (and I think HP and IBM) to implement their stack and then
admitted that TCPIP had become the de-facto standard that allowed
computers from any manufacturer to talk to each other (the primary
purpose of OSI).

The governmments (this includes europe as well) had a vision of a
neutral stack (OSI). Something commercial was developped, but meanwhile
TCPIP came along at a much faster pace and responded to the needs of a
neutral networking platform.

You also need to look at Cisco. They came out with a gizmo called a
"router" which allowed simple boxes to do that routing job, which made
it possible to have simple TCPIP nodes without needing the equivalent of
"DECnet routing". And that gave TCPIP a big push.