[ih] Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[John Day]

At 10:11 -0800 2011/02/10, Tony Li wrote:
>  > As for addressing and routing, the OSI world eventually produced 
>something useful for /interior/ routing, but never for 
>inter-organization routing.  So whatever the claimed concerns, after 
>15 years of effort, the OSI world produced nothing viable for 
>Internet scale addressing or routing.  As with most OSI work, the 
>deliverable of field utility was always two years from now.
>
>This is absolutely correct for routing, but absolutely incorrect for 
>addressing.  OSI mandated an addressing architecture that both 
>aggregated and was variable length.  The Internet still hasn't 
>learned this lesson and insists on a fixed length, non-scalable 
>addressing scheme.

Tony,

I believe that you are wrong on the first point.  There was an 
Inter-Domain Routing Protocol developed in OSI.

 From the Acknowledgements section of RFC1771 (BGP-4):

"This updated version of the document is the product of the IETF IDR 
Working Group with Yakov Rekhter and Tony Li as editors. Certain
sections of the document borrowed heavily from IDRP [7], which is the 
OSI counterpart of BGP. For this credit should be given to the ANSI 
X3S3.3 group chaired by Lyman Chapin (BBN) and to Charles Kunzinger 
(IBM Corp.) who was the IDRP editor within that group."

If memory serves the IETF and ISO versions were developed in parallel 
by the same people.

Unlike the Internet, the OSI stack did have a full addressing 
architecture and distinguished between addressing the interface and 
addressing the node.  Application Process names were location 
independent and not tied to any particular address, unlike domain 
names.

I was a little confused by Dave Crocker's comment. about X.400 email 
addresses.  It doesn't sound right since they were in the Application 
Layer and names were location independent. However, since X.400 was 
primarily developed by the PTT faction of OSI, I can readily believe 
that their implementations were tied to providers.  Although I doubt 
this was the general case.  But I can check.

Take care,
John