[Info-vax] Rethinking DECNET ?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2014-09-04 13:22, Neil Rieck wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 2, 2014 11:39:20 AM UTC-4, JF Mezei wrote:
>> 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).

That is true. In fact, I don't think any other company even did 
implement an OSI compliant network stack at all. Which is a good sign it 
was not going to be the future of networking...

> 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)

The clean breaks are neccesary for tunneling to work, but I fail to see 
what difference the number of layers on the IP side have to do with 
anything.

> 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:

Yes, DEC was one of the three companies behind Ethernet. No news to me 
at least. DIX is a well known acronym in my brain.

This actually leads me to pet networking peeve #2 (right after trying to 
fit TCP/IP into the OSI 7 layer model). Networks using ethernet are not 
using 802.3, in spite of all kind of people thinking so.
They are using Ethernet II. The difference between 802.3 and Ethernet II 
is one small and simple thing, but a very important one.
There is a 16-bit field in the frame, which in Ethernet II is the 
protocol number, while in 802.3 is the frame length.

No one uses 802.3...

	Johnny