[Info-vax] Rethinking DECNET ?

[Neil Rieck]

On Tuesday, September 2, 2014 11:39:20 AM UTC-4, JF Mezei wrote:
> On 14-09-02 10:18, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> >> DEC bet the farm on OSI. At the time it looked (imho) like a good bet,
> 
> > 
> 
> > One of many mistakes!!
> 
> 
> 
> Betting the farm on OSI was not a mistake. At the time, governments
> 
> mandates interoperability between different systems and mandated that
> 
> all major computer manufacturers build a common network protocol aka:
> 
> OSI.  (aka: solve  incompatibilities between IBM SNA, DECnet, Unix IP
> 
> and various other proprietary protocols from the "bunch".)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The mistake was not when DEC bet the farm on it. The mistake happened a
> 
> bit later when DEC didn't realise that IP had become the common de-facto
> 
> standard replacing OSI which was going nowhere.

Correct. Over the years I have considered myself fortunate to have attended many courses at DEC (Maynard, Bedford, Kanata, etc) and can still recall several comments made by one instructor about OSI and DECnet-V

1) DEC was the first company to produce an OSI compliant stack (apparently everyone in the company was proud about this).

2) The clean breaks between the 7-layers allow for doing other things like tunneling over IP (although the best of both worlds could only be achieved if the TCP/IP stack was also 7-layer)

3) This was the same guy who told me that DEC helped to invent Ethernet networking in the late 1970s. Up until that course I had never heard the name "DIX" (Digital, Intel, Xerox) but a quick google search of the words "DIX Ethernet" returned this wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame#Ethernet_II

But all this is moot because just as some people at DEC saw "Alpha as a threat to VAX" others saw "TCP/IP as a threat to DECnet". A small critical-mass of naysayers inside DEC was one of many reasons why DEC is no more.

But I still have my memories (for now).

Neil Rieck
Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/