[ih] Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[Amelia A Lewis]

A Unix application reports status zero for success.  Any other number 
(not actually an infinite choice, alas, to undermine the analogy) is 
failure.

It's not always true that there's only one right answer, in standards 
work.  It's not a bad approximation, though.

It *is* always true, I think, that the folks who have committed their 
energy and reputation to a "wrong" (less-optimal) answer are unlikely 
to back down.  Saying "oh, I was wrong, and you were right," is ... 
well, in specifications work, it's probably more unusual than the 
annual recurrence of 1 April.  It's probably more common for someone to 
abandon a position, adopting a new one, and indignantly rejecting any 
suggestion that they ever advocated otherwise.  Still more common, in 
my experience, is that the captain goes down with the ship.  "What 
iceberg, dammit?"

I don't know that OSI and TCP/IP were that much in "competition," 
though.  The OSI stack was backed by a consortium and by governments, 
and everyone knew it was gonna be better.  When it was finished, and 
worked.  TCP/IP was just something that worked.

Eating what's set before you, solving the problems you face without 
waiting to solve the problems that you think *will* be faced, seems to 
be a recipe for getting food on the table by dinnertime.  It's likely 
that it leads to problems, but the problems are gonna be defined by the 
cook who produces something, not the one who plans a feast for 
tomorrow.  Matter of having diners still living, or something.

That is, while OSI may have solved a number of thorny technical 
problems in theory, it isn't clear that they were practical problems 
that anyone was ever going to face.  TCP/IP addressed the practical 
problems.  It created practical problems.  I don't know that these two 
approaches are properly labeled as 'competition.'

Amy!
On Sun, 13 Feb 2011 20:28:07 -0800, Richard Bennett wrote:
> Not so much, there were more people in the OSI and Internet groups in 
> the 1980s who didn't work with the other group, it just took too much 
> time to do both.  We've all seen examples where a given standards 
> body chose the wrong proposal, and other examples where it imported a 
> better one than the local product. (Good) standards are apparently 
> scarce resources.
> 
> On 2/13/2011 8:13 PM, Guy Almes wrote:
>> Richard,
>>   I'm sure that's true generally, and I suppose there were examples 
>> in the great TCP/IP-vs-OSI era.
>>   In this particular case, however, it was more cooperation than 
>> competition.  The same people (Yakov and others) were involved in 
>> both and just trying to get the best technical work into both BGP 
>> and IDRP.
>>       -- Guy
> 
> -- 
> Richard Bennett
-- 
Amelia A. Lewis                    amyzing {at} talsever.com
The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.
                -- Indigo Girls