[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[Eric Gade]

I partially agree with you, and I didn't mean to engage in that kind of
tautology. Of course, what I mean is IFIP, whose work was intended to
contribute to OSI (IFIP reports describe the WG 6.5 work as pre-standards
work for OSI). I should point out, however, that I never referred to X.500
and that has crept into the conversation in some other way.

This also may just be a matter of dissonant worldviews. Where in OSI you see
a series of discrete, technically explicit standards, I see an (overly?)
ambitious, top-down standards project for computer networking that was
unprecedented by international standards work at the time. It reflects a
profounding optimistic perspective that relies on a consistently global view
concerning the application of these technologies. Those involved in this
overal project were obviously going to bring this optimism and global
perspective to whatever related projects that they were involved with. IFIP
people were involved with DNS and the work of IFIP was the closest related
to the same issues that DNS addressed.



On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 11:56 PM, John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:

>  The thing is I don't know what you think the "OSI issues" were?
>
> I would have to look, but I don't think in 1984 that the X.500 work had
> started and if it had it would have been very early. They would have been
> coming up with a directory protocol and trying to throw everything in that
> someone might use for a naming tree.  There was certainly no consideration
> of what sorts of naming trees would actually be created, or for that matter
> who was going to create them.  It certainly would not have been "OSI."
>
> Lots of people had ideas but there was no OSI position on it.  That I can
> guarantee.  The date on X.500 is 1990.  Generally took 4-5 years to do this
> and the X.500 stuff was highly controversial within OSI.
>
> The naming and addressing addendum to 7498 didn't complete until 88.  It
> was just getting started in 84.  X.500 didn't even start until Part 3 was
> well along, because I sent one of those guys to shepherd X.500.
>
> Again, what you are labeling OSI issues really seems to be after the fact.
> You appear to have fallen prey to the "effect of TS Eliot on Shakespeare"
> phenomena (with apologies to David Lodge).
>
>
> At 22:53 +0000 2011/02/17, Eric Gade wrote:
>
> The original plan, as I recall, was to simply have gTLDs.  But somewhere
> before the final TLD meeting at SRI in January 1986, there was a decision
> to
> allow the UK to have a TLD.  Most likely this reflected a request from
> Peter Kirstein.
>
>
>
> No one from this list nor anyone else I tried to contact could give me a
> definitive answer on when this decision was made. I had to try and figure it
> out myself. It appears that something changed between May and July of 1984.
> In July, a draft RFC was posted that included the ISO-3166 list for the
> first time. Four months beforehand, Postel first announced to Namedroppers
> that he felt there should be countries represented somewhere in the
> hierarchy. This came after a fairly significant amount of lobbying by all
> kinds of people, but many of them had OSI sympathies.
>
>
>
> Of course the idea of organizing by countries predates OSI. The idea of
> organizing DNS by countries, however, doesn't. This wasn't a common-sense
> solution either. The biggest concern in the first few years was to find a
> way to quell the voices calling for naming structures that reflected network
> topology, and many believed that organizational (as opposed to geographic)
> would solve the immediate concerns, given the landscape of the connected
> nets (think AT&T, Xerox, etc).
>
>
>
> I am not retroactively trying to politicize these issues, because in the
> documents people at the time explicitly describe these problems as
> political. Again, I'm going on what I've found, which may be an incomplete
> picture. But take the counterfactual: without the prominence of OSI issues
> in the general discourse, which itself brought at least some of the
> attention of Arpanauts to international geopolitics, would there have been
> the ccTLDs in the system? I would say no. You can argue that UK is an
> exception because of the UCL link and I would of course concede the point.
> But I don't think it's fair to argue that suddenly including UK opens up the
> entire ISO list, especially since they don't even follow the standard.
>
>
>
> --
>
> Eric
>
>
>


-- 
Eric
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