[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[John Klensin]

On 2/17/11, Eric Gade <eric.gade at gmail.com> wrote:

> We sort of got into this last week, but didn't push it too far. OSI is
> unique from an international standards perspective because the was
> prescriptive. As far as I know, it was an unprecedented move for ISO (and
> maybe national standards orgs?) because they typically standardized existing
> practices. OSI was, to my knowledge, mandated in some way where it was
> creating practices rather than standardizing existing ones.

Eric,

I won't make any claims about cause and effect -- I don't know, I
imagine those who might know would disagree, it it is probably
off-topic for this list -- but there were several panics in some of
the national standards bodies in the 80s about how to make or keep
themselves relevant in information technology-related areas.  Those
concerns created a great deal of ferment, out of which came, among
many other things, the notion of "anticipatory standards" as
differentiated from "standards reflecting existing practice in
industry".  Arguably, other symptoms included the creation of ISO/IEC
JTC1 in 1987 after several years of discussions and the ISO TC 97 -
CCITT Joint Development Agreement (which JTC1 and ITU-T later
inherited).  It is not a very big step from "anticipatory standards"
to "standards development bodies defining basic architectural
("reference") models and designing their own protocols.

Again, no assertions about causes, but the general climate of the
times may have been much more important to the unfolding of some of
these developments than you seem to have inferred.