[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[John Day]

I would agree with Craig.  We knew from the early 70s we needed a 
directory of some sort and Grapevine was the first attempt.  There 
was little or no influence between DNS and X.500.

X.500 in the hands of the PTT faction and some misguided generalists 
quickly got out of hand trying to be far more than simply resolving 
application names to network addresses.  Making it so general made it 
useless for that purpose.

The X.25, TCP/IP debate was broader than an OSI/Internet issue.

That debate was really a X.25 vs Transport Layer at all debate, which 
had started around 1974. Years before OSI began. The transport side 
of this debate was championed by INWG at the beginning.

n that debate, the research networks (NPL, CYCLADES, EIN, 
ARPANET/Internet, and various other European research centers as well 
as XNS) were all advocating a transport protocol while the PTTs 
argued that an end-to-end Transport protocol was unnecessary.  X.25 
was all you needed. For the Europeans, X.25 was forced on them by 
their PTTs but everyone knew it was not a reliable service.  (Resets 
lost data).  So at the very least Transport would operate over X.25. 
I believe that the ARPANet used X.25 in place 1822 at the edge later. 
(X.25 was strictly speaking an IMP-Host protocol or as they called 
it, a DTE-DCE interface.)

This was the beginning of the connection/connectionless war that 
continued at its most intense within OSI once it started.  In OSI it 
was the war between CLNP/TP4 vs X.25/TP0 also known as X.25 only.  I 
could never figure out what the PTT position was all about since it 
was obvious that X.25 would not handle the bandwidth that we were 
using.

But in those pre-deregulation days, the PTTs stunting business growth 
in Europe was the norm.

Take care,
John

At 12:47 -0500 2011/02/17, Craig Partridge wrote:
>  > In a more general sense, I bring this up because we could have a more
>>  nuanced historical discussion on the list. Don't get me wrong -- X25 v
>>  TCP/IP is definitely interesting, and discussions of the "failure" of OSI
>>  are both useful and seem to still ignite a decent emotional response. I
>>  think it could be more constructive, however, to consider the truism of "the
>>  coming of OSI" in the 80s and the effects that had on the system we have
>>  today. To deny that it had no influence on both technical and structural
>>  aspects of the ARPAnet and its children might be a little short-sighted,
>>  though I'm not suggesting that anyone has been doing that. After sifting
>>  through a lot of material, I'm ready to argue that this OSI truism had a
>>  fairly important influence on the DNS. I'm equally prepared to be verbally
>>  blindfolded, given a camel light, and put before the firing squad of
>>  criticism.
>
>Hi Eric:
>
>Understood re: administrative and I don't have anything to add there
>(ex-NIC folks on this list will).
>
>Regarding OSI and the DNS.  I don't know about NIC administrative procedures.
>But regarding other aspects of the DNS, you should understand that the DNS
>was used as a weapon against "the coming of OSI".
>
>So far as I can tell, the design of the DNS had zero relation to OSI/X.500
>naming.  It probably had some influence from Grapevine (as I recall, PVM
>says he didn't use Grapevine as an input, but reading the namedroppers
>list is it pretty clear [at least to me] that others commenting on his work
>were influenced by Grapevine -- things such as the initial two-level DNS
>naming system which reads just like Grapevine's two-level system).
>
>Then in January 1986, when the central question of finalizing DNS TLDs
>was decided, it was explicitly decided to structure .US to make it
>completely useless for X.500 migration.  I was at the meeting and
>remember thinking that the decision had elements that might make Jon
>Postel (who made the decision) into a technological King Cnut, but
>subsequent events made it an effective way to thwart OSI.  (Brief
>sketch: the TLD meeting was more than finalizing Internet TLDs, it
>determined the naming schemes for UUNET and CSNET and BITNET [all of
>whom were at the meeting].  So it created a common email addressing
>system that spanned the 4 biggest email networks.  The biggest app
>was email and by keeping the naming schemes very distinct, it meant
>that transitioning to OSI required a painful, organization wide, change
>in email addresses.  In contrast, when NSFNET came along and UUNET,
>CSNET and BITNET collapsed into the Internet, the email transition was
>largely seamless for users and created a single network that was too big
>to imagine transitioning).
>
>Thanks!
>
>Craig