[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[John Day]

I couldn't agree more!  Some one really needs to talk to DeBlasi.

If I ever met him it was only once or twice. I didn't work at those 
esoteric levels you did! ;-) But I was constantly coming up against 
his handiwork in the strategy the IBM delegates took.  It sure seemed 
that Joe was a master of electro-political engineering!

We were seldom in agreement but he was very good at what he did. ;-)

At 8:53 -0500 2011/02/18, John Klensin wrote:
>On 2/17/11, John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
>>  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.
>
>Absolutely.   JTC1 didn't come together until nearly the end of the
>decade although the work started much earlier.  If I recall, it was
>the brainchild of Joe DeBlasi (IBM's corporate head of standards,
>later ACM Exec Dir).   I chaired ACM's (late and mostly unlamented)
>Standards Committee from about 1986 and so got to watch that part of
>the process from ANSI/ISSB among other places.    But I was less
>concerned about the specific standardization events -- many of which
>were fairly peripheral to the OSI developments and Internet/OSI
>interactions -- than the degree to which they indicated that the
>environment was fermenting, making some adventures by standards
>development bodies possible that would not have been possible before
>and might not even be possible some years later (with the emphasis on
>"might" -- some of what is now going on in ITU-T may not be that much
>different).
>
>>  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.
>
>Carl Cargill has made the claim on several occasions that he invented
>anticipatory standardization.  I've had no reason to disbelieve him
>even though we disagreed (at least at the time and for some years
>thereafter) as to whether it was a great idea or a disaster waiting to
>happen).   If this is important, someone might check with him on both
>dates and how things unfolded at levels considerably above any one
>CCITT / ITU-T SC or ISO WG or EG.
>
>>  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.
>
>Yes.  But I think actually an almost-separate problem at the standards
>policy level, even though I've assumed it played out most dramatically
>at the SG / WG one.
>
>>  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.
>
>Part of what also drove those collaborations (both TC97-CCITT and the
>later formation of JTC1) was a realization by both companies and
>governments/ PTTs that they were spending a lot of resources sending
>people (often the same people) to parallel meetings, often to advocate
>particular results in one and to provide a defensive/blocking force in
>the other.   Joint development agreements and consolidation were
>supposed to fix that.   With a quarter-century of hindsight, it didn't
>work very well and still doesn't.
>
>>  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.
>
>Yes.  But also more complicated.  If this is important, someone should
>try to find Joe and read him out -- that perspective would be, IMO,
>very useful.
>
>      john