Even the Stanford/Cisco people were thinking "multiprotocol gateway" back then. Much of the push for TCP/IP came from the buy side. I did my networking work when I was at a big aerospace company, and we wanted everything to talk to everything else. Not have DECNET<->SNA<->XNS<->X.25<->TP4 gateways trying to interconvert. The vendors all pushed their proprietary systems.

Even Berkeley didn't get it at first. Early Berkeley TCP/IP only talked to other Berkeley TCP/IP systems. They had to be beaten on to get interoperability to work. 4.3BSD shipped with broken sequence number arithmetic that only talked to itself until we fixed that.

This was back when big buyers had more clout than software vendors. It's hard to do that today.

I truly believe suppliers have more influence on market creation direction than buyers, to all of our detriment.

Wouldn't TCP/IP run on token ring? My understanding that token ring is at the same layer as Ethernet, and thus wouldn't exactly be a competitor for TCP/IP.

Though IPX and friends are children of Xerox’s XNS.