[ih] Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[Miles Fidelman]

Amelia A Lewis wrote:
> 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.
>    
I can relate to this comment.  I watched a lot of this from the 
sidelines; I was at BBN from 1985-92, working on various aspects of the 
ARPANET transition to the Defense Data Network - and dealing with some 
of the hassles of reconciling policy with reality (remember the "dual 
stack" policy; sort of like the Ada policy).

TCP/IP was developed bottom up - "rough consensus and running code" - by 
academics and engineers.  OSI was an attempt to impose a classical, 
top-down, standards approach - write the standard by committee, then fix 
things later.  As I remember it, the only justification I ever heard for 
OSI was a political one: "the Europeans will never accept a standard 
developed by the US Dept. of Defense," and there was a lot of muscle put 
behind OSI from the General Accounting Office (I never quite understood 
the politics there).  From where I sat, the technical arguments about 
how OSI solved a bunch of problems, came across as rationalizations from 
people who spent their time sitting on standards bodies, rather than 
building things.

Anyway, as I recall, the first European INTEROP came along, the OSI 
folks were still saying "just wait, it will be great when we get there," 
and everyone else was blown away by the fact TCP/IP was working and 
commercially available from multiple vendors.

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In<fnord>  practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra