[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[Miles Fidelman]

John Day wrote:
>
> You are kidding!  CLNP was part of the plan all the time from day 
> one.  It was the fight over CO/CL that put off starting.  Luckily 
> there isn't much to it.  It also required getting the IONL in place so 
> that the place of internetworking vs X.25 as SNAC was clear.
>
> The only reason the US was participating at all was to have a 
> connectionless network layer.  Good grief, what have you been smoking?

As I recall it, from the grousing of our (BBN) folks who were off to the 
meetings:

1. Mike Corrigan at GSA was pushing very, very hard for the US 
Government, including DoD, to go all OSI (I never quite understood why).

2. Nobody thought it would work, but those of us in the DoD world had to 
live with the "dual stack" model (which never really deployed as far as 
I can tell).

3. Folks were off to meet about CLNP as a defensive strategy - just in 
case the &*&!s (chose your pejorative) really pushed OSI through.

> I thought say that.  First of all no one really cared about anything 
> but TP4 the other were just the PTTs attempt to discourage the use of 
> a Transport Layer. But if you must know:
Does not compute..... Who needs TP4 over a connectionless network 
layer?  And if only the US folks cared about CLNP....  Am I missing 
something, or wasn't the idea TP0 (or null) over X.25 vs. TP4 over CLNP?

>>>
>>> No there is no ISO number stamped on TCP.  That decision was worked 
>>> out in an open process in IFIP WG6.1 prior to start of OSI, which 
>>> chose a modified CYCLADES TS.
>> Again, a political, top-down process - rather than one based on 
>> moving something from experimental->recommended->mandatory status.
>
> How do you figure?  IFIP 6.1 was hardly a top down process.  And 
> hardly political. It was primarily the research networking people. Do 
> you make this stuff up?
>
> What part of operational since 1972 did you not understand?
>
> CYCLADES was an experimental network doing network research.  There 
> was a lot of experimentation with it, it was recommended.  No 
> standards are mandatory.  That is why ISO is a *voluntary* standards 
> organization and why ITU issues Recommendations not standards.

There's operational and there's operational.  ARPANET was carrying 
military traffic, and being split to form the Defense Data Network, 
while CYCLADES was being killed by the PTTs.

>>>
>>> As long as we are on the topic, all of the IEEE 802 standards are 
>>> also ISO standards.  Ethernet was in use for close to 10 years 
>>> before it was an ISO standard.
>> Because IEEE is the protocol standards agent for ANSI which is the US 
>> representative to ISO (if I have the terminology correct).  IEEE 802 
>> is a pretty good example of starting with competing products, and 
>> then creating a standard that forces every vendor to modify their 
>> stuff just ever so slightly.
>
> Sometimes.  Yes, you are correct.  Although I have no idea why IEEE 
> bothers.  Ethernet is an ISO standard.  What you describe is very much 
> the case in IEEE today.  It was less so at the beginning but even 
> there one had competing products:  Ethernet, token bus, token ring.  
> It was what a lot of people wanted but it was the processs produced.

I'm not sure why IEEE bothers either, but they seem to be doing 
something right with the 802 line of standards.

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In<fnord>  practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra