Is it possible to fall in love with a protocol? I mean, really? I know I am a nerd, and I guess this is yet further evidence of my nerdom. But to properly tell this story, we have to go in the Wayback Machine with Mr. Peabody to 50 years ago, when Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn were working at Stanford and inventing these protocols. I was too young to appreciate the events at the time, but later my life would change drastically as I learned more about TCP/IP and how to get it working in my professional life.

You can read the original 1974 paper here as well as watch an interview with both men that was recorded earlier this year.

In the mid 1990s, I would meet Vint and so began our correspondence that has lasted to this day. I posted an interview with him in 2005 here that is still one of my favorite profiles. This was when he was about to start at Google and when I was running Tom’s Hardware. I asked him to recall the most significant moments of TCP/IP’s development:

• 1/1/1983 – The cutover on Arpanet to TCP/IP
• 6/1986 — The beginning of NSFNET
• 1994 — Netscape supports HTTP over TCP/IP and when Berkeley BSD 4.2 unix release with support for TCP/IP
• 2007 – The introduction of the iPhone

That is a pretty broad piece of computing history.

TCP/IP spent its first couple of decades growing up. Few people used it, and those that did were more akin to being members of a secret society, the keepers of the flame called Unix. (Unix would evolve into Linux, as well as the MacOS, and then into containers.) But then something called the Internet caught hold in the early 1990s. I wrote a blog post not too many years ago about the early tools we had to suffer with during that era to get TCP/IP working on other computers, such as DOS and Windows and Netware. It was far from easy, and many businesses had all sorts of pain points to get TCP/IP working properly. BTW, that link also has a hilarious clip about “the internet” that has held up well.

Netware is actually where my love for the protocols blossomed. Many of you might recall how powerful this early network operating system was, and how it could run multiple protocols with relative ease. They saw the importance of TCP/IP and invested heavily in equipment that would bring it to ordinary desktops, and by ordinary I mean the versions of Windows that we had to suffer with back then. Setting up a computer to connect to something else then was made a lot easier with Netware’s TCP/IP support.

But it wasn’t just Netware, but the web that really turbo-charged TCP/IP. That also took off during the 1990s, and it went from curiosity to standard practice seemingly overnight. The web really changed how we interacted with information. In my own case, I saw the publications that were making millions of dollars selling printed magazines go to a much reduced online form, and editorial staffs drop dozens of people from their mastheads. Now it is rare that a publication has more than a single full-time editor, which is great if you are a freelancer (which I am) but then budgets continue to shrink too, which is not great.

But in spite of these cataclysmic moments, I still say that I love TCP/IP. I don’t blame the protocol for the transformation of my industry. Au contraire, it made my computing life so much easier. Its beauty was its extensibility, its universal connectedness that was useful in so many different situations. And it also enabled so many apps, both then and now. And every app tells another story, which is after all my bread and butter.

This week, I bought a lighting controller that supports TCP/IP, for example. And that brings up another point. Today, we don’t give TCP/IP much attention, because it has been woven into the fabric of our computing systems so well. It is pervasive: you would be hard pressed to name a computer that doesn’t support TCP/IP. And by computer, I mean our smart TVs and other home appliances, our cable modems, our networks, our cars.

Vint wrote me after he read this essay: “TCP/IP has been improved over the years by people like Van Jacobson and David Taht among others. Google introduced QUIC which provides TCP-like functionality with some additional features. But it has certainly been a workhorse for the world wide web and its applications.” Note what he is doing here: giving credit to other innovators and extensions who have built some interesting things on what he and Kahn came up with 50 years ago. A class act.

So much love to spread around. I count myself lucky to have been present for the last 30 years of the tenure of TCP/IP, and chronicle its growth and popularity.

About 20 years ago, Skype was the backbone of my telecoms. I used it to stay in touch with a worldwide collection of editors when I was running Tom’s Hardware and to make all of my international calls for pennies per minute. Some of you are old enough to remember when these calls cost dearly, if they could be made at all.

When you think about this broad stretch of time, and that you can now reach people on the other side of the world, with usually solid audio (and in some cases video) quality, it is pretty amazing. And it is nice to have lots of choices for your comms too.

If you want some perspective on how much this tech has changed since 2006, check out this piece that I wrote for the NY Times about the business instant messaging use. Remember Lotus Sametime? Jabber? AOL? Yahoo?

I wrote about this most recently in 2020 here, where I staked out the entire messaging interoperability problem, and when Teams was just muscling into this market.

This week I gave up my subscription and last remaining Skype credits of some $3. I haven’t used the thing in months, and it was time to say goodbye. Since being absorbed by the Redmond Borg, it has gotten less usable and useful. I almost always get stuck trying to figure out how to authenticate myself into live.com among my numerous accounts.

My choices for international communications is now plentiful. If I have to actually talk to someone, the most used is WhatsApp, which works reasonably well and is almost universal among people that I connect with. In second place is texting, either using SMS/iMessage or sometimes with Facebook Messenger. If I were younger I would probably put texting in first place. I use Microsoft Teams or Slack to communicate with my business colleagues, depending on which platform they are using. Sometimes I use Google Talk to make a few calls from my computer. My mother-in-law has an Alexa show, which makes for yet another channel to use.

Juggling all this tech can be tiresome to be sure. But it meant that Skype was gradually marginalized as time went on.

I have been writing about online shopping for more than 25 years, starting in the mid-1990s when I became so enmeshed in it that I taught classes for IT folks to implement it in practice in their companies. I reviewed that history in an earlier post here.

Back in those early days,​ I had fun assignments like trying to figure out how long it took staff from an online storefront to respond to me-as-a-customer email queries, or documenting how hard it was to actually buy stuff online. Yes, someone actually was paying me to write an article about online stuff, which then would be published in a printed magazine weeks later. It seems so quaint now.

I also had a two-day seminar at various international trade shows about understanding internet commerce, payment systems, and installing and operating your own web storefront. One group of the attendees were from the US Postal Service, who were trying to put up a storefront selling stamps. Seems simple, right? What happens when your inventory can’t reflect the actual real-time situation — then you have a lot of angry stamp collectors. As I said, fun times.

Today I want to vent about a more basic issue: why has the online storefront become such a shopping hellscape? Let me explain.

Last week I wasted about an hour of my life trying to purchase two toiletries: shaving cream and deodorant. For many things, I am not brand-sensitive, but for these two items I am. Being a Prime Family, I went first to Amazon, where I was presented by dozens of online merchants that would try to sell me the exact item that I wanted. Except, they weren’t actually Amazon itself, but third parties. Many of which had “only 2 items left” warning labels — the latest come-on employed by online scammers everywhere. Create that sense of urgency, fueled by Covid supply chain issues, and get the customer to commit NOW! I moved on.

Next was Target.com, where I was greeted by first making sure that I had captured my account password before I attempted to buy anything. Then I had to decide which of three methods to get my stuff: by mail, pickup in the nearest store (what was my zip code, since I neglected — deliberately — to have that in my account profile), or same-day delivery. Each had a raft of options depending on how quickly I needed my items. And I hadn’t yet gotten to where I actually could search for my two precious toiletries. Forget Target.

Walgreens and CVS websites weren’t much better. I almost bought something here — I can’t recall which drug store — that would have one item mailed, one that I could pickup. Only it wasn’t at the nearest store, but one a few miles away. What was I doing? That was when I came to my senses.

I closed my computer in disgust and got on with my day.

Yesterday, I resumed my quest. There is a local drugstore that is a few blocks from my house, and I happened to walk by and thought, let’s just go in and see what they have in stock. Now, this is a small family operation not affiliated with the big chains. But that is a good thing because of three reasons. First, if you call them, you can actually talk to a live pharmacist within a moment, without having to wait on hold for 20 minutes or more. Second, they don’t lock away their stuff, like the big chains do, because of theft problems. But they get around that with an interesting twist: their shelves look very bare, because only one item of a given product is put there. That is their solution to shoplifters and the effect initially is quite eerie. But they didn’t have my brands, so I went away empty handed. (The third reason is that I have gone there to get my shots, because again they are easy to deal with.)

I came home frustrated. Then I thought I would try the small grocery store literally across the street from my home. Finally — and ironically — success. After running around in circles, the solution was simple, and the prices just a little more for the convenience of not having to navigate a series of lengthy menus and other effluvia.

Mission accomplished.

So what has happened to online storefronts in the past 25 or so years? In the quest to make everyone able to buy just about anything, they have become unusable. Menus are inscrutable, choices confound, and delivery mechanisms are so plentiful that they can paralyze consumers. So as I am looking through my slide deck for those c.1997 seminars that I taught around the world, I happened upon this summary of the implications of ecommerce:

• Consumer control of privacy is essential  — most folks simply want the choice of opting out
• The granularity of control must be fine, e.g.,
  • over number and frequency;
  • over categories of interests; and/or
  • over (indirect) dissemination to third-parties

In some respects, we have come a long way since those early days. In others, we are still learning these basic concepts. And next time I need something, I will head across the street to my local shop first.