s implemented, and the Berkeley code became avail- able to anyone wanting to use it. The price, under the BSD license, was to merely acknowledge the university's copyright. Berkeley Unix became widespread in the mid-to-late 1980s. Sun Micro- systems, for instance, got its start selling inexpensive hardware that ran a BSD- The Great Telecom Meltdown based Unix. So did many other workstation vendors, most of whom did not have the same staying power. Other operating systems also gained TCP/IP implementations, some ported from BSD. The Berkeley code was not always elegant or fast, but the price was right, and it did, in general, provide multiven- dor interconnection. Even the humble MS-DOS PC could run TCP/IP, although it was not until Windows 95 that Microsoft included it. So corporate networks were developing around this free and surprisingly effective protocol suite. Numerous companies provided infrastructure support: Cisco Systems, for instance, was another mid-1980s start-up whose routers became very popular for corporate backbone networks. Its later good fortunes were based on its having embraced TCP/IP even while the smart money was on OSI. Digital Equipment Corp., in contrast, spent hundreds of millions of dol- lars on OSI. It was a network leader in 1985, yet by 1990 it was a rapidly declin- ing also-ran, having been late to the TCP/IP party. Digital was not alone in missing TCP/IP's rise. OSI was a huge project, getting huge press and academic backing. Even the Department of Defense, sponsor of the ARPAnet, had jumped on the OSI bandwagon. It had promul- gated a rule, called GOSIP (for Government OSI Profile), that required com- puter systems vendors to have OSI support by 1990. (The United Kingdom had its own GOSIP.) Some people took this to mean that the government's TCP/IP networks would be replaced by OSI. But it did not work that way. Not only did GOSIP never really take hold, but it was only a vendor checklist item. Govern- ment procurements would have to have OSI available; GOSIP did not mean that an