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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (563526)	4/28/2010 1:35:43 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575771

" There was the 1822 protocol" That has been obsolete for decades. "than NCP came along, some use of X.25, UUCP, UDP, TCP, IP (first v4, than the addition of 6)" Umm, Tim, all of those preceded the Internet. The only change since then has been the possible adoption of IPv6. And that isn't so much of a change as an extension. Especially given that it is backwards compatible with IPv4. "In which case either it would have supporting something else equally good, or someone else would have wrote an HTML browser" That likely would have been the case. But there is no guarantee that those things would have wielded the same influence. We know that the Mosaic browser was the 'killer app' that resulted in the modern Internet. We don't know if any alternative would have done the same. In fact, there are reasons to be dubious. "Mosaic isn't the dominant browser anymore either, and it wasn't even the first browser." Again, so? All existing browser are clear descendants of it. And it was key in making the Internet what it is today. "Wordstar was for a time dominant. It was the first wide spread PC software word processor." Yes, it was. But no one can make a credible claim that Wordstar was instrumental in making the PC market what it is today as can be made for the Mosaic browser. "Its not so much about Wordstar anyway, but the fact that without the specific item that became either the first or the first in wide spread use, most important categories of things would have existed anyway." But only a few of those shaped those categories in the way that the Mosaic browser did. Again, its adherence to open standards was a big thing. Proprietary standards were much more common back then. For example, look at the OS market. While Linux and the other open sourced OS's have some market share, it is dominated by proprietary OS's. Or, the office software market. Those markets would be very different if open source software had grown to dominance instead of the proprietary software packages.