[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[Andrew Russell]

A recent interview with Joe DeBlasi by Arthur Norberg is available for free at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1720595.

DeBlasi seemed eager to talk about standards, and provides some insight on pages 6-9 or so.  For example, 

"when you represented IBM, there were two things that really came into play. The first was to protect IBM’s business interest; to make sure things were not done in a way that would adversely impact the investment we had in our major technologies. The second was to manage that process so there was a good feeling on both sides and we were not being obstructionists. We made major contributions to all the standards efforts. I believe these efforts were positive for us, our customers and the industry."

Andy


On Feb 18, 2011, at 9:15 AM, John Day wrote:

> 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
>