[patrickaljord]

> See for instance how SSH replaced TELNET, REXEC, RSH, SUPDUP

> Or I might add, how HTTP replaced GOPHER[3].

telnet and gopher were used by a few thousands servers only and were not consumer facing technologies (for the most part), it doesn't make sense to compare that to IPv4 and HTTP that are used by millions (billion?) of servers.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

The factors that caused slow IP4 to IP6 transition are cited as examples by the author you are criticizing. It's very clear they are aware of the scale of http deployment as well as the challenges that brings. In fact, that key point motivates most of their objections to the current standards proposals.

[hollerith]

>telnet and gopher were used by a few thousands servers only and were not consumer facing technologies

The card catalogs at most university libraries and most libraries of any national or international importance were reachable by telnet in 1992. And I think card catalogs count as a "consumer-facing" service.

The vast majority of internet client software in 1992 was text only. The first exception to this that I am aware of is the WWW, which most internet users had not started to use by the end of 1992 (email, newsgroups and ftp being the most widely used services). The way most connected to the internet or an intranet from home was by sending vt100 or similar protocol over a dial-up link -- with a Unix shell account or VMS account at the other end of the link. Repeating myself for emphasis: in 1992 most people accessing the internet from home or from a small office used a modem and IP packets did not pass over that modem link. The point of this long paragraph is that the vast majority of the machines on which these shell accounts ran were also reachable by telnet.

Finally, the telnet protocol in 1992 was a "general-purpose adapter" similar to how HTTP is one today. For example, the first web page I ever visited I visited through a telnet-HTTP gateway so that I could get a taste of the new WWW thing without having to install a WWW browser. Note that this telnet-HTTP gateway is another example of a "consumer-facing" telnet server.

In summary, there were probably more than a few thousand telnet servers in 1992 -- and many of them were "consumer-facing".

I am almost certain there were a few million users (certainly so if we include college students who used it for a semester or so, then stopped) of the internet in 1992, and most of those users used telnet.

[DougWebb]

IRC was pretty widely used back in the day too, and it was and still is text-only. There have been a number of non-text replacements for IRC (SecondLife being the most successful) but most died off. IRC's grandchildren, Twitter, SMS, all of the instant messaging and chat services, are all still text-only or close too it.

[hollerith]

OK, but I feel the need to stress that when I wrote "text only", I was referring to the user interfaces.

(And the reason user interfaces are relevant here is that telnet was the main way to export user interfaces over the internet in 1992.)

[lloeki]

> telnet and gopher were used by a few thousands servers only

I can't speech for Gopher, but I routinely see telnet and rsh all around the industry, where anyone with control of some Windows machine on the network can sniff critical PLC and server passwords. Even when SSH is available for the servers. It is hopefully a changing situation as servers get replaced/upgraded and SSH gets more and more pervasive.

[lukeschlather]

Telnet ain't dead. It's used by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of networking devices the world over.

[bmelton]

Sukuriant's point might be terse, but it's not invalid either.

In 20 years' time, I'm pretty sure that the next iteration of us will be saying something like "When they phased out HTTP, there were only a few billion servers..."

Better will always make its way in, even if there are entrenched systems running the 'old faithful' code already out there. IE6 is being phased out, yes, VERY slowly, but we're already way closer to getting it down to an irrelevant number than we would be if there weren't pushes. Will we ever get rid of it completely? Maybe not. I'm sure there's still a gopher server out there somewhere or another, and it's not that uncommon to get Telnet access to some commodity (crappy) web hosts, but SSH is pervasive and good, and we're all better off for it.

[sukuriant]

Why not?

[jfoutz]

Who won't support spdy by the end of the year? The pace of protocol obsolescence is increasing. I can't find stats about how much http traffic facebook is responsible for, but i'd bet it's at least 1%

Governments and home grown enterprise apps are my guess about who's late to the party.

[mooism2]

El cheapo web hosting will be late to the party. TLS certificates will be a stumbling block.