[ih] [IP] OSI: The Internet That Wasn't

[Scott Brim]

On Wednesday, July 31, 2013, Dave Crocker wrote:

> ... and my own reading was that CLNP had a reasonable shot at being
>> selected from amongst an array of contenders.  However the IAB's premature
>> selection of it -- rather than letting the community continue through an
>> evaluation process -- finally brought to a head the continuing tension
>> between the IAB's style of exercising authority and the community's
>> festering frustration with it.
>
>
Agreed.  The timing and execution by CLNP promoters was weak throughout
that entire period, otherwise "IPv6" could have been quite different.
 Although it was not _everyone_ who had a problem with the IAB - rather,
their unexpected behavior wrt CLNP united different groups against them.


> In the early 1990s, I wrote some articles on the Internet standards
> process and tried to describe the apparent difference in the IETF's
> engineering style vs the world of OSI.[1]  What I finally concluded was
> that both communities had serious, bright engineers who were trying to do
> good things.  And both communities had engineers who would each bring long
> and different lists of requirements.  The distinguishing characteristic
> between Internet and OSI engineering was/is how the sets of lists were
> processed.  In the OSI world they would try to satisfy the union of the
> lists.  This demands a large complicated system that takes a long time to
> produce.  The Internet looked for the intersection, thereby permitting
> earlier delivery of an essential subset.
>
> And that, I believe, is the actual core lesson from this history:  For a
> complex problem space, find a useful subset that can be delivered quickly.
>  Deliver it and start gaining field experience.  Based on that experience,
> then start extending the capabilities.
>

Is this where we segue to talking about the state of the  IETF?

Scott
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