[ih] Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[Dave CROCKER]

On 2/10/2011 11:09 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>      >  From: Dave CROCKER<dhc2 at dcrocker.net>
>      >  I believe that was also the expectation within the Internet
>      >  technical community
>
> In some quarters. Not all of us agreed. ;-)

That's always true in our community.  It's why we seek /rough/ consensus rather 
than complete and why we need to be clear about whether something represents an 
individual's view versus rough consensus.


> (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... ;-)

It's pretty well established that none of it really works, witnessed by how 
badly the Internet performs.


>      >  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).

I'm talking about TCP, not IP.  And this was a second-hand anecdote.  I wasn't 
there.


>      >  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.

Not all of us were always polite.  (But that's merely a variant of the above 
observation that our community is never monolithic in its views...)


d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net