[Info-vax] Rethinking DECNET ?

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Saturday, 6 September 2014 12:05:54 UTC+1, Johnny Billquist  wrote:
[snip]

"OSI, in contrast, was a committee deisgn"

What do you see as the difference between an RFC and a committee design? 


"very few full implementations around (did really any other that DEC do it?)"

Multiple other vendors had connectivity and interoperability, but may
not have had full integration with their own network stacks.


"in the 80s, TCP/IP proved that it already existed, it already worked, and
was already available on multiple platforms."

We may have to disagree, especially if you mean mid 1980s.


"[OSI] interoperability was still not proven"

Says who? In the mid to late 1980s and beyond, there were standards,
there were the equivalent of "plugfests", there were conformance test
suites. Conformance does not of itself prove interoperability but it's
a pretty good start. 


"it was much more heavyweight than TCP/IP"

Ansolutely, especially when you consider the stuff that sits on top,
which is always an essential thing to do, even if some people routinely
tried not to.

See this week's NSF/Cisco/etc announcement for what happens when you
finally start to think (again), maybe even think architecturally, about
stuff that sits on top of the TCP/IP layer.

E.g. POP/SMTP dates from the teletype era. OSI's X.400 etc is somewhat
more recent, offers rather more facilities, and consequently demands
rather more resources than its prececessor. So what. Hardware has moved
on, even if IP and the stuff on top of it has barely changed.


"in the end, people took what worked."

Short term people took the cheapest short term fix. There are a lot of
cheapskates around.


"Microsoft was not even on the horizon back in those days. "

Microsoft were admittedly a little bit late "getting" the Internet.

GOSIP was early 1990s. WinNT was early 1990s.

Some customers may have been willing to defer (or alter) strategic
purchasing decisions because one of the big name vendors was offering
"jam tomorrow" (carry on, or start, using Windows, we'll sort out
proper GOSIP compliance Real Soon Now. Trust Us, what could go wrong).