On Tue, 5 Nov 2013 11:49:40 -0800, Jon Perryman wrote:
>... sad that he's bringing others to the dark side.
> ...
>* z/OS: SNA existed long before TCP/IP was available. SNA was a robust,
>reliable and secure communications methodology. Once TCP was became available,
>we had the same situation as Betamax versus VHS. TCP won.
>
There's always a reason. Rarely is it an analogue of Gresham's Law,
to which one partisan attributed the triumph of UNIX over VMS ("Bad
software drives out good!") Betamax succumbed to the greater capacity
of VHS cartridges; a decisive advantage in the eyes of consumers at a
tipping point in time despite the higher quality of Beta in professionals'
view. For many years thereafter I saw Beta only in the kits of TV news
reporters on location. I think VHS had caught up in quality and Beta
in capacity, but both camps has too much capital investment to switch.
So, why TCP/IP over SNA?
o Price?
o Openness of standards and implementations (price, again)?
o Institutional bias against a perceived single-vendor solution
(openness, again)?
o Structured name space (thereby larger and more easily
partitioned/distributed)?
o DNS (name space, again)?
Imagine an alterate universe without TCP/IP but an Internet
very simlar to ours; Google; Facebook; Skype; iTunes;
NetFlix; and all; all running (FSVO) smoothly on SNA. What
modifications or extensions had to be made to SNA to
accommodate this?
-- gil
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