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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. |