Linux and growth of Internet

Sellam Ismail wrote: . I assume that was supposed to be "without Linux." I'll bet someone like Tom Jennings will have a totally different take on this than I do, too. [ Ah, there's his note... Clearly I've been editing this response too long. ] Where to start... I disagree about the growth of the Internet not being possible without Linux. It would have been different, perhaps, but I honestly don't think it would have changed enough to surprise someone who popped into a Linux-less parallel universe as regards email and the Internet. Might have changed a lot more regarding the popularity of open source software, but that's a different discussion. I think that the growth of email and the Internet in everyday life rode two big trends. One is the rise of CompuServe and AOL, which I'll leave for another discussion. The second was the rise of small scale ISPs in the 1993-1994 timeframe, at least in the Northeastern US, and that they were offering raw dialup IP connections. They'd give you a POP account, maybe shell access, and that set the stage to a great degree for non-corporate, non-academic participation in the Web when it came on-stage. Regular folk with Windows/Mac machines were signing up for these accounts, not just tech weenies, for all the reasons that email was popular. No long distance charges, asynchronous between sender and receiver, faster than the post, etc. I recall some who were downloading freeware and shareware like crazy, but the major thrust for this non-tech segment I observed appeared to be email, with some IRC/chat junkies. This led a gentle but steady ramp that was ready to explode with the advent of Web browsers. And the low-usage email customers were what supported the model, not the high-usage geeks who would try to nail up connections all the time for the low-ball prices. Why don't I think Linux was a major factor in this? Surely many of these ISPs used Linux? Well, maybe so. The ones I dealt with would use whatever they could get their hands on to provide the backend services they needed, and didn't care what they had to use to do it. No Linux? Hey, that free thing 386BSD works, or this 1993 fork called NetBSD. But to be honest, most of the time they very, very grudgingly spent the money for Sun gear, at least for the most critical machines/services. And then ran them without any service contract or spares on-hand, which always made me cringe... At least, this is what I ran across in my adventures, your mileage obviously varied. But again, I wouldn't give Sun credit for the spread of the 'Net and email either, for the same reason. If it hadn't been Sun, it would have been something else, and I ran into odd bits of DEC and SGI here and there. I think there were several factors coming to bear, like the NSF AUP changes, like the appearance of PCs with IP stakcs in many more homes, like falling prices for the low-end leased lines that the new ISPs depended would massively oversubscribe... ;^) You want a technical change to point to? I'd point to TCP/IP coming to Windows and the Mac. (Yes it had started much earlier, but it was now getting easier and more reliable.) I'd point to terminal servers getting good SLIP/PPP and connection accounting support. And whatever it was that prompted the Baby Bells to start providing DS0 lines and fractional T1 loops to anybody who could scratch up the cash, if that was in fact a technical change. Would many companies have done things differently without Linux? Sure. But even so, I think it would have happened at a slightly reduced pace with *BSD under the cloud of the USL/UCB lawsuit and the high price of a BSDI license -- which when I looked at it was closer to $1,000 per host, not $100 for a site license! (Might have been a built-in support cost, memory is fuzzy...) The hardware savings alone would have continued to make that a compelling combination versus $10-20k for Sun workstation. Okay, I've spouted off enough for now. I'm curious to see what other responses come in, and what others remember from that time, now as on-topic as anything else since it's more than 10 years ago. Gulp! --Steve.