25 Feb
2011
25 Feb
'11
10:50 a.m.
> I was on the MSN team and we were building an
AX.25 network
Have you read "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates"
?
What a mess. Apple was no better, though (eWorld, etc.) I don't
remember much push for broadband as mentioned in "Barbarians"
I came from the academic side where Ethernet networking had been standard for some time by
the mid-90's and getting networks of VAXen and Suns to interoperate was a breeze.
In contrast the mid-90's era focus by consumer OS's (read that as "Windows
and bolt on products") on the modem as the lynchpin in networking, was simply bizarre
to me.
By that time on PC-clones with MS-DOS we had been using the NCSA stack for Telnet and FTP
and all the other good stuff, for many years. Completely stable and just worked. I was
especially fond of a simple configuration of MS-DOS Kermit.
I was completely stumped by Windows 95 networking and Trumpet Winsock. They made it a
zillion times harder. To this day whenever I have to configure Windows networking and am
forced to click on all the variations of "No I don't have an ISP but I can still
connect to the internet" I still become enraged.
Tim.