Due to the efforts of a small number of people in Apple engineering (notably Erik Fair), Apple was a pretty major internet presence in the early 90’s. Though, oddly, the exec level pretty much didn’t know it existed. Remember eWorld? (Probably not.)

How did Apple get a /8? “We asked.” (https://www.quora.com/How-did-MIT-end-up-with-an-entire-clas...)

> "We asked"

Not "just" asked for by Apple, but fairly close.

The relevant bit: 'we renumbered the entire company from "picked out of the air" IP Addresses to net 17, assigned to us upon request by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) (R.I.P., Jon Postel).'

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-reasons-Apple-employees-...

The odd man out in the corporate /8 space seems to be Ford Motor Company.

I think Prudential Insurance (48.0.0.0/8) is even weirder.

Microsoft pretty much had an anti internet strategic policy until 1995, that’s why. Back in the day a tcpip stack was a third party add on.

Microsoft got lots of its address space by buying Nortel assets.

Trumpet Winsock?

Consider that when Trumpet Winsock was a third-party IP add-on for Windows 3.1, classic MacOS already had IP support built-in.

Ironically around that time Microsoft was selling Xenix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix) which did support it.

Originally Apple's MacTCP was actually a product they sold separately, it wasn't bundled into the OS until 1994. Although it was usually easy to get a hold of a copy since universities and such had site licenses, and ISPs often had redistribution licenses

Ah, it was introduced in System 7.5 which, perhaps coincidentally, was the first version of MacOS I had when I needed to connect it over TCP/IP.

Why would you want to be a part of the inter-net? Microsoft has all of MSN!

I assume this comes from NeXT who did lot's of TCP-stuff early, not sure though.

Microsoft whoever came to IP world quite late and did NetBEUI or IPX before.

Remember that Microsoft believed that the future was subscriptions to CDROMs like Encarta that would be delivered by mail.

It was late to the party on the internet, but was a pioneer in seeing the value of subscription computing, predating pretty much every SaaS company out there today.