[ih] inter-network communication history

[Vint Cerf via Internet-history]

see RFC 1109
v


On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 3:32 PM Craig Partridge via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 12:41 PM Brian E Carpenter <
> brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Marshall Rose once told me that he regretted the "S" in SNMP, because it
> > was anything but simple. And I think he also said that ASN/1 was chosen
> > mainly to build bridges with the OSI world. But SNMP was a success (about
> > 300 related RFCs exist).
> >
>
> Re: ASN.1.  My recollection of the history runs as follows.  HEMS needed an
> extensible external data format -- we wanted folks to be able to add MIB
> extensions w/o having to publish them. That is,  you'd just retrieve a
> module of variables associated with an interface and in addition to the
> standard variables you'd get anything else the vendor wanted you to know.
> And at the time, almost all external data formats were of the form
> "receiver knows what is coming".  So XDR and NDR and such.  I didn't want
> to invent an external data format so I asked around BBN and Debbie Deutsch,
> who had been part of the team that developed the ASN.1 BER said "how about
> ASN.1?".  It met the need, so I grabbed it.  ASN.1 also made the OSI folks
> happy but that wasn't the goal.*
>
> When Jeff Case and team decided NSFNET couldn't wait for HEMS, they grabbed
> what they considered the best parts of HEMS and subsetted it to make SGMP
> (which became SNMP).  Now the OSI folks were around and it may be that Jeff
> and team decided that to avoid annoying the OSI crowd, they'd stick with
> ASN.  I don't recall them saying that, but it is possible and would be
> consistent with Marshall's remark.
>
> Craig
>
> *The interactions of HEMS and SNMP with OSI were politically complex.  But
> technically it was pretty simple.  Within six weeks of the HEMS effort
> starting we were ahead of the OSI network management efforts and we stayed
> ahead until HEMS ended.  I would argue that SNMP was also ahead as soon as
> SNMP was implemented.  The OSI thinking at the time was fragmentary (not
> enough folks were trying to manage a big network) and, if I remember right,
> the first time the OSI network management standards went up for a vote they
> failed.
>
>
> --
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