[ih] Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Dave CROCKER <dhc2 at dcrocker.net>

    >> The general understanding among computer companies in the mid-80s
    >> was that TCP/IP was a fine proof-of-concept, but the real network
    >> was going to be OSI.

    > I believe that was also the expectation within the Internet
    > technical community

In some quarters. Not all of us agreed. ;-)

(PS: See below for more on this...)

    > the OSI world eventually produced something useful for /interior/
    > routing, but never for inter-organization routing.

There are also those of us who held (and hold) a dim view of all the routing
products of the TCP/IP world... ;-)

    > For email addressing, the OSI model chosen was actually unworkable
    > .. For the same mailbox in your organization, you needed a different
    > public address for each provider (common carrier) that you were
    > connected to. 

Yet another design that never quite got the namespaces right for path,
location and identity... ;-)


    > a failure to adequately understand end-to-end interoperability
    > requirements. Observe, for example, the number of different and
    > non-interoperable connection-based transport protocols seeking to
    > provide essentially the same type of service to the client layer
    > (TP0-TP4).

Yet another place where the importance of network effects (i.e. maximizing
the size of the pool of potential communicatees) was not understood by
that community... :-(

    > As I understand it, the TCP effort had a close call with this same
    > issue, when LANs started to be popular. I heard there was strong
    > pressure to have a version of TCP tailored LANs but that Vint vetoed
    > it.

I'm not sure quite which one you are referring to? Is this the 'trailer
header' stuff from Berkeley? I'm not sure that Vint needed to (or, by
then, had the capability to) stomp on any of this - it was pretty clear to
most people that such things were a bad idea (and why).

There were also things like that attempt to design a 'hardware-friendly'
transport protocol (i.e. one optimized for implementation in hardware)
- was XCP the name? - and that also went nowhere, for similar reasons.


    > So much for claims the Internet was hostile to OSI...

But it was! I mean, we were _polite_ to the OSI people and all, but some
of us (many of us?) had every intention of killing OSI stone dead.

An amusing story which makes this point: I recall the first time I met Lyman
Chapin, it was at ISI (don't recall which meeting, but it was very early on
though - ca. mid-80s or so). In the corridor during a break, he was explaining
to me how we Internet people were 'politically unsophisticated' (I think those
were his words - that was the sense of them, anyway). I recall quite
distinctly thinking at the time 'it is not in the interest of those who want
TCP/IP to win to disabuse this person of his misconceptions'! Some years later
(I think it was after the IAB/IESG blowup in '92) I told him this story, to
which he smacked his head and said "Did I really say that?!" :-) Enough water
had passed by then that he was amused, which I was glad of. Silly competition
in some sense, really. Oh well...

	Noel