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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nommedeguerre who wrote (18538)	4/16/1998 8:57:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 24154

Not that I'm Chaz, but I'll butt in with some obvious conjecture. You can look up Nathan Myhrvold's New Yorker profile from a while back (THE MICROSOFT PROVOCATEUR, by Ken Auletta. The New Yorker, May 12, 1997, pp. 66-77, I dug up a web copy once but can't find one now) for a nostalgic look at the Microsoft vision. This dates from when the old-style totally proprietary pay-per-minute AOL looked like the next big thing, and that's what MSN was modeled on (by the ever innovative Microsoft). Not one net, a whole bunch of them, a vast network of proprietary information toll roads for every interest and niche. Going back farther, on the technical level, what was contemporary with the evolution of the internet protocols was networking as an extension of vendor OS's. IBM had SNA and RSCS/VNET, DEC had DECnet, and lord knows what else. AT&T had this grandiose plan called Net/1, maybe something else in its original incarnation, that was going to emulate everybody else over the PSTN, or something like that. Then, after TCP/IP started to take off, there was the vast, all encompassing fiasco of the ISO OSI protocols. X.25 survives here and there, but most of the rest of that seven-layer flop is mercifully forgotten. The one networking thing from that era that might actually have worked out ok was the Xerox stuff, which was technically pretty good, similar to the IP world in its internetwork-style architecture. Xerox was going to go public with it in something called XTEN, but Xerox being Xerox, nothing came of that. All in all, things worked out far better than one might have hoped, but I heard from a little birdie that Microsoft has hijacked the internet, so maybe none of it makes any difference in the long run. Internet2=NETBIOS. Cheers, Dan.