• Re: The "Standards" Game

    From Lars Poulsen@lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com to comp.os.linux.misc,alt.comp.os.windows-11 on Mon Aug 25 03:12:59 2025
    From Newsgroup: alt.comp.os.windows-11

    On 2025-08-23, c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
    "Standards" were NOT coveted back in the 70s and
    early 80s. Makers INTENTIONALLY made their HW
    incompatible so you'd be STUCK with their stuff.

    On 8/23/25 2:02 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
    IBM was doing it in the '60s, Microsoft has been doing
    it ever since, and others are eagerly following suit.
    HTML is becoming a proprietary language, for instance.

    The classic game was to say that one should follow publicly defined
    industry standards. In computers and communications, these were defined
    by ITU and IEEE. The major companies sent their people t the committee
    meetings and each of them tried to get the standards to reflect how THEY
    were developing the thing, and to require processes that theyhad already patented.

    The academics building the Internet did not participate in this process,
    but the engineers doing the work went and swapped ideas, and once they
    had working code, published open standards before patents could be
    filed. We all know how this outcompeted the ITU and IEEE standards.
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  • From The Natural Philosopher@tnp@invalid.invalid to comp.os.linux.misc,alt.comp.os.windows-11 on Mon Aug 25 11:48:56 2025
    From Newsgroup: alt.comp.os.windows-11

    On 25/08/2025 04:12, Lars Poulsen wrote:
    The academics building the Internet did not participate in this process,
    but the engineers doing the work went and swapped ideas, and once they
    had working code, published open standards before patents could be
    filed. We all know how this outcompeted the ITU and IEEE standards.

    Indeed we did, Interop and all that lark 'My telnet client wont talk to
    your telnet server, why is that? let's put a packet monitor on and see'

    'Oh, well that's not illegal, but my also not illegal code barfs on it.
    Let's think of the simplest standard addition that we can both adhere to
    to get stuff working'

    Fun days.
    --
    The New Left are the people they warned you about.

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  • From Lars Poulsen@lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com to comp.os.linux.misc,alt.comp.os.windows-11,alt.folklore.computers on Mon Aug 25 13:03:28 2025
    From Newsgroup: alt.comp.os.windows-11

    On 25/08/2025 04:12, Lars Poulsen wrote:
    The academics building the Internet did not participate in this process,
    but the engineers doing the work went and swapped ideas, and once they
    had working code, published open standards before patents could be
    filed. We all know how this outcompeted the ITU and IEEE standards.

    On 2025-08-25, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
    Indeed we did, Interop and all that lark 'My telnet client wont talk to
    your telnet server, why is that? let's put a packet monitor on and see'

    'Oh, well that's not illegal, but my also not illegal code barfs on it. Let's think of the simplest standard addition that we can both adhere to
    to get stuff working'

    Fun days.

    For a few years in the early 1990s, I went to the IETF meetings. Very
    busy events, with 8-12 tracks of working group meetings. When they got
    to 2000 participants, it became really unwieldy. The best times were the
    late night sessions in the Hyatt atriums, when the NSA guys and the NASA
    guys were playing Global Thermonuclear War surrounded by a large group watching.

    In then there were the PPP plugfests. For years, I kept a T-shirt that
    said "I can PPP". And someone from PacBell pointed out the woman who was
    the real life inspiration for "Alice" in Dilbert.

    Some of the people were truly amazing. Some weird shit was happening
    behind the scenes. A guy in Finland built an anonymous remailer
    (double-blind). Many government agencies did not like it, but could not persuade the Finns to stop it. Eventually Milo told the network people
    at Helsinki University, that if they did not get him out, Finland would disappear from the Internet. 24 hours later that particular problem
    was gone - permanently.
    --
    Lars P
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