Also, most of the specs that we love and rely on today came from "big vendors" The core internet protocols we rely on, though, mostly didn't. If you look at th

Also, most of the specs that we love and rely on today came from "big vendors" The core internet protocols we rely on, though, mostly didn't. If you look at the authors of RFCs specifying the widely used standards, nearly all of them were at research institutions: Steve Crocker was at UCLA then ARPA; Vint Cerf was at UCLA, then Stanford, then ARPA; Bob Kahn was at ARPA; Jon Postel was at UCLA then USC; Paul Mockapetris was at UC Irvine; Abhay Bhushan was at MIT; Tim Berners-Lee was at CERN then MIT. Not sure if that's good or bad, but it seems to have been uncommon until recently for internet protocols to come from vendors. edit: I did think of one important one, IPv6. Steve Deering was at Stanford, then Xerox PARC, then Cisco, and IPv6 came out during his Xerox/Cisco period. Bob Hinden was at Ipsilon Networks, then Nokia.