[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[John Day]

John,

All you say here about what happened in the 80s is true.  The 
formation of JTC1 etc. But that was quite late to the game.

The idea of standardizing to a point in the future was set prior by 
set the first meeting of SC16 in March 1978 and the Joint Development 
with CCITT by 1979/80 was quite early.  (The biggest mistake in the 
whole effort).  At that time, the idea was that things were changing 
so fast that one had to shoot for a point in the future.

The world views between the computer companies and the European PTTs 
were so different and the PTTs saw so much at stake, there was no way 
anything good could have come from it.

It might have been better had the cooperation with CCITT not 
happened. But with no deregulation even considered in 1979, the 
European computer manufactures didn't have much choice.

To some degree this may well have been a strategy to get out ahead of 
IBM and the PTTs. Given their dominance in the markets, had they not 
attempted something like that and gone with standardizing current 
practice it would have been SNA over X.25, instead of TP4 over CLNP.

At 22:21 -0500 2011/02/17, John Klensin wrote:
>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.