[ih] A paper

[Andrew G. Malis]

I WAS there in the 80s, at BBN, where I worked first on the ARPAnet writing
IMP code, and then later I managed, at DARPA's direction, the ARPAnet
transition from NCP to TCP/IP. I also wrote reports for the DoD to help
them plan their "eventual" transition from TCP/IP to ISO/GOSIP/CLNP/TP4,
which as we all know never actually happened. I was also writing RFCs
before the IETF was even established. So I've got some amount of personal
knowledge here. :-)

IMHO, NONE of the decisions made at the time were "political" in nature.
TCP/IP won over OSI because it was designed by a group of people (largely
grad students at the time) that were interested in creating something that
worked, and once they had a protocol design, they wrote the code for
prototypes and tested it out both in locally in their labs and using the
ARPAnet as a testbed for making it work over a WAN, which they had access
to as they were students. They saw what worked and what didn't, and then
refined the specs and implementations to match. All of this work happening
in the open arena resulted in the relatively rapid development of freely
accessible specifications and implementations that anyone could obtain and
play with. As has been said elsewhere, that resulted in it being taught to
other students, and them playing with it in their labs, resulting in a
broad knowledge base entering industry. Meanwhile, the free code was
adopted by and incorporated into the major OSes of the day, especially the
various flavors of UNIX, or was available as add-on implementations, either
free or commercial (such as FTP Software's stack for DOS and early
Windows). And much of this happened even before the IETF existed!

Meanwhile, OSI kept plodding along, but you had to pay for the
specifications in order to just read them., and at the time whatever
implementations that existed weren't free, and couldn't hold a candle to
what was freely available for TCP/IP.

The folks working on OSI were very aware of TCP/IP and had a lot of good
ideas for improvements, and could have won if their specifications and
implementations had also been freely available, and if their timing had
been better (earlier rather than later).

Cheers,
Andy



On Sun, Jul 18, 2021 at 2:55 AM Patrik Fältström via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> On 18 Jul 2021, at 1:08, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote:
>
> > Are there some decisions you think were *not* made for technical
> reasons? Particularly in the 80s.
>
> I was not present in standardisation in the 80s. I started around 1990.
> Over time, I saw, specifically when later being area director and in IAB,
> arguments be other parameters visible in market economy. From my
> perspective, calendaring was the first real situation when technical
> arguments did not have any role at all in the IETF. It was just market
> economy (and the ability to expand the market the sponsors of the
> technologies had).
>
>    Patrik
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>