>>> I just thought it interesting that there was TCP/IP development back then, even if primarily at the LAN level.
It goes to intent. How can they have been really planning at that time as company policy to integrate a browser with Windows if they were still dragging their feet on the basic Internet protocols? Of course it doesn't prove that they weren't doing so before the 1994 consent decree. That would be possible. Not that that could not have been anticompetitive technology in either case.
>>> I still haven't seen a date for when Microsoft actually shipped a Win3x Winsock TCP/IP.
First one I saw that actually worked right with Suns and so forth was around 1993-1994, under WFW 3.11 and then I think NT 3.50, but I'm a little foggy on that. Winsock 1.1 was the first one that sucked less.
>>> You thought OS/2 had some pretty good stuff in it, didn't you?
Oui. E.G., what we know as Microsoft Networking today, with NT domains and security and Win95 peers/clients, was originally from OS/2, lock stock and barrel. They still interoperate, and for a long time (haven't tried it lately) you could use either OS/2 server or NT server as a domain controller on the same network and they would back each other up. This is the heart of the value of both systems, and had nothing to do with DEC or Cutler, AFAIK. At that time, though, they used Netbuie/Netbios, not TCP/IP, and were still fighting with Novell over whether MSFT could make clients with Novell capability. A long negotiation, since at that time Novell had 70-90 % of that market.
IBM folks used to tell me how pissed they were that MSFT would constantly let down the side during latter technical development of OS/2. This stuff is in deja-vu and other news historical services.
Speaking of anticompetitive intent, Novell had plenty of it then. Another was Sun.
At one time you could buy a great networking system called TOPS, which would let you hook up your PC, your Sun, and your Macintosh, using Appletalk and/or TCP/IP (via Ethertalk), back in the late 1980s. Worked great. The wankers in Sun management, thinking this was killing their workstation sales because you could connect with a PC or Mac in terminal sessions (talk about not getting 'it'), bought TOPS out, and without even a decent interval, killed it and stuffed it into a hole in the basement. Because they had thus lost this opportunity to set in concrete their status as of that point as the server of choice, they left the field wide open for Novell and MSFT NT and OS/2.
Cheers,
Chaz |
