[Info-vax] Reading Gordon Bell's VAX strategy document

[gah4]

On Friday, September 29, 2023 at 5:24:53 AM UTC-7, Neil Rieck wrote:

(snip)

> 7) I knew a lot of people who were running third party stacks on their Windows and Macintosh systems between 1994 and 1998. At that time network communication interfaces all cost a lot of money, so most newbies were asking questions like "how can I be using this internet stack for free?" My answer was always "anything developed by the US tax payer is usually placed into the public domain". 
 
It was just about then, that NIC prices came down to really affordable prices.

I was about then working on school networking projects, where we really could put Ethernet into a school.

But yes, both MS-DOS and MacOS had little support for Ethernet.  There was NCSA Telnet, which connected directly to the Ethernet card, with no OS support.  (That was free, government funded.  There were some non-free versions around.)

After not so long, MacOS had some support, and we ran a different NCSA Telnet. But also about then, Netscape 2.0, which was small enough to run on smaller Macintosh systems.  

I do remember buying networking parts on eBay, and often could buy 10 for less than the price of 1.
People who wanted one, didn't bid on 10.  (Less likely now, but maybe it still works.)