[ih] Hesitating to disagree with one of the fathers of the Internet…..

[Bill Ricker]

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 5:34 PM, David Elliott Bell <
bell1945 at offthisweek.com> wrote:

> the need for layers (3 will do if you know what you're going; if you
> don't, 11 won't help you);


Correction, it is canonically '17 won't help you' .
The ironic allusion to the hol(e)y 7 of the Other Reference Model ("ISORM")
makes this MAPhorism much funnier than mere exaggeration.

a world view about which layers and the rigidity required to enforce
> layers; proposing alternate protocols for achieving a desired goal; things
> like that are part of design-ARPANET.


Mike having come to protocol design and programming via poetry rather than
prosaic electrical engineering, yes, he viewed layering as the design, as
the essense. The fact that both the IMPs and NCP have been retired but the
network that  (D)ARPA wrought lives on as "the Internet", over a hybrid
hodgepodge of physical subnets, militates that his logical view of The Net
has won out over the physical, just as the pragmatic, good-enough ARM has
won out of the overly baroque OSI ISORM .

However ...

The Popular History of the Net has largely been told from the BBN POV. As
an editorial/authorial decision, this is understandably so, much though it
may annoy those who worked on upper layers. Having a for-profit's PR office
on the case doesn't hurt, but that is not solely responsible. It's easier
to follow BBN'S  IMP/TIP narrative than a narrative spread over several
campuses and multiple OS's no one uses anymore, and far easier to explain
challenges of hardware than challenges of software to a general audience. I
have corroboration on that bald assertion -- Tracey Kidder interviewed the
DG 'Eagle' operating system team manager while researching 'Soul of the New
Machine', and couldn't figure out how to explain it, so went back to
focusing on hardware and microcode teams. Networking may be easier to make
metaphor than an OS, but not compared to modems.

[I worked for said DG manager at his next gig, and volunteered with a
'microkid' a few years later. The microkid taught me to drink cognac at ACM
committee meetings; Mike's whisky lessons cured me of that quickly.]

-- 
Bill
@n1vux bill.n1vux at gmail.com
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