[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[John Day]

Not exactly an apples and apple comparison.  When Telnet was done, no 
one was quite sure what the architecture was.  By 1978, there was a 
pretty good idea of what needed to be done and how to coordinate it.

The same could be said of the Internet model done a few years after 
Zimmermann's paper.

Are you suggesting that standards should not build on current knowledge?

OSI was trying to assemble a set of standards.  It needed a 
coordinating framework.


At 9:45 -0500 2011/02/18, Craig Partridge wrote:
>  > In what sense was OSI top-down? The OSI process was every bit as much a
>>  bottoms-up, participant-driven process as IEEE 802 is today. If there
>>  ever was a top-down standards process in the networking world directed
>>  by two or three lords of the purse, it certainly wasn't OSI.
>
>If you read the original OS layering paper by Hubert Zimmerman it is
>clearly a top-down management work plan.  Useful to compare it with
>the ARPANET layering paper of a few years later.  The difference is Zim's
>"here's how we'll break up the problem of developing standards" vs.
>"here's why creating TELNET led us to a layered architecture".
>
>Thanks!
>
>Craig
>
>>
>>  On 2/17/2011 4:16 PM, Eric Gade wrote:
>>  >
>>  > 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.
>>  >
>********************
>Craig Partridge
>Chief Scientist, BBN Technologies
>E-mail: craig at aland.bbn.com or craig at bbn.com
>Phone: +1 517 324 3425