The elegant protocol that lost
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Asynchronous Transfer Mode was a fixed-cell switching protocol with genuinely elegant properties, backed hard by the telecom industry through the nineties. IP routing won anyway.
The argument matters to this graph because of what Cheriton said about it: that ATM would never be adopted, that IP would simply work if the industry started routing it, and that the push was a scam by telecom vendors to protect their hegemony. It is also an early instance of the pattern the architecture is built on — the technically superior design losing to the one that composes better with everything else.
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