[hanslub42]

Knoware (pun intended, probably), my first Internet provider, back in 1993, had a 9600 baud connection to the Internet, shared by all his customers. When I phoned the guy (late, as he worked at night and slept during the day) to get a login, his first question was: do you have a Mac? There was no TCP/IP stack for Windows back then (Trumpet Winsock only came out in 1994, and was not a Microsoft product). He had heard of linux, said that it probably would work, but I would be on my own.

Fast forward to 1995: Windows 95 still didn't have TCP/IP (that only came with service pack 1). MSN was clearly intended as a Windows Internet, to eclipse and make irrelevant the existing one, leaving Mac and linux outside in the cold.

Of course, the local pizza guy would have to pay to be on it. Win-win for Microsoft.

[tialaramex]

While Microsoft may well not have understood it (as a corporate entity, or indeed key decision makers at the firm) it was a done deal long before 1995.

I date it to late 1991/ early 1992 when JIPS stops being a pilot service.

Background, by 1990 there are two popular global networking technologies, the Internet Protocol suite of Unix adjacent technologies born in the US, and the X.25 suite of technologies popular in Europe and standardised by the ITU (ie mostly the world's phone companies). In the UK, naturally influenced by both as an English-speaking country right on the coast of Europe, in 1990 they have JANET, the Joint Academic NETwork, providing X.25 service to various universities across the country, much as the early Internet joins US universities.

In 1991 JANET announces JIPS, the JANET IP Service, as an experimental "pilot" project. Universities can choose to have this American protocol to try out as well as their existing X.25 service. JANET tries very hard to sell TCP/IP as merely an interesting experiment that you could use where X.25 doesn't have a good way to achieve something. Campuses rapidly ignore that, installing a Unix with a TCP/IP stack is something the enthusiastic Unix nerds in your Computer Science or Electronics departments will seize on, and despite an insistence that they should not use the Internet's email, because X.25 has email, too bad they're going to start doing SMTP. By the end of the year this "pilot" project is driving JANET adoption, it's no longer experimental, new "customers" see X.25 as an afterthought, their Unix nerds want IP and they want it ASAP -- JANET begins transitioning to just an IP network, the X.25 services will eventually be terminated.

That's game over, on a level playing field, X.25 v TCP/IP is a win for TCP/IP and the third Network will be the Internet. X.25 goes in the scrap pile with mechanical television and Boustrophedon. Things that might have taken over the world, and if they had we might think them normal - but in the end they did not.

[billpg]

I do remember this not-quite-internet at university in the 90s. Telnet was "spad" and FTP was "hhcp". If you wanted to connect to a real FTP server, you had to send hhcp requests to "ft-relay" and the FTP hostname was the first folder name under the root.

[tialaramex]

Coloured book protocols (X.25 based networking) existed at some UK universities as late as 1997, it was still possible to use this network when I was an undergraduate in 1995, but the service was no longer available by the time I graduated.

Here is a link to a site describing a system that you could use (probably considerably earlier than 1997) to access the Internet (in this case an FTP server) despite only yourself having X.25, via hhcp:

http://deslab.mit.edu/UNIXhelp/guestftp/index.html

[tinus_hn]

Although it was not installed by default, the original release of Windows 95 did feature tcp/ip as an option that could be installed from the cd:

http://www.michusa.com/SupportFiles/win95ppp/win95.html

[folsom]

I started running a pre-release version in early 1995 and never had to install anything from the CD. Maybe it detected my off brand ne2000 network card and just installed it by default. Easy networking was my favorite part of windows 95 at the time.

[kolinko]

MS was pushing information superhighway back then - a top down network done by big media players that was supposed to overcome Internet

[iso1631]

It's getting there