TCP/IP faced a lot of competition (e.g. from token rings), but won out probably due to simplicity and robustness. The current dominance of HTTP is largely due

TCP/IP faced a lot of competition (e.g. from token rings), but won out probably due to simplicity and robustness. The current dominance of HTTP is largely due to firewalls, NAT, and possibly developer familiarity (e.g. proxying, debugging via cURL, etc.). I wasn't online in the 80s, but I remember networking in the 90s being a mixture of HTTP, POP, SMTP, IRC, FTP, Telnet, NNTP, etc. The noughties saw an increase in protocols for P2P, instant messengers, etc. These days those seem to have consolidated (e.g. BitTorrent, XMPP, etc.), are often tunneled through HTTP, or are displaced by something newer which tends to use HTTP.