It was easy: the TCP/IP folks had BSD and it was running in the universities, and anyone who wanted to sell to them had to run BSD or else support TCP/IP too be

It was easy: the TCP/IP folks had BSD and it was running in the universities, and anyone who wanted to sell to them had to run BSD or else support TCP/IP too because it was the only easy way to integrate into those universities' networks. Then people who went to school in the late 80s took that to $WORK in the early 90s, and by the mid-90s everything that wasn't TCP/IP had died. Novell's IPX, for example, was a thing still in the mid-90s, but a dying thing. Winsock for Windows 95 was the last thing that was needed to make TCP/IP rule -- after that there was just no way to do anything but TCP/IP. It was a matter of network effects.