[ih] A paper

[Brian E Carpenter]

Andy,

Thanks (and Vint) for that injection of facts. I'd like to qualify one remark, though.

> IMHO, NONE of the decisions made at the time were "political" in nature.

It does slightly depend on where you were sitting though. Where I was sitting from
early 1985 (the networking group at CERN) our main motivation was to get from a
horribly diverse set of protocols to a standard set, and that pushed us very hard
towards OSI, and that was our official policy. We changed that policy a few years
later when it was clear that TCP/IP was much more widely supported by our 
vendors
than OSI. That was all entirely pragmatic and technically based. However, 
there
was tremendous pressure from two quarters against that choice, purely on political
grounds: from European Commission officials and from the incumbent telecom carriers
(i.e. the PTTs). Of course that wasn't anything to do with human rights impact,
but only to do with defending European industrial interests against perceived
US high-tech hegemony, and defending the incumbent telcos' monopolies. So 
it
was also bound up with the general push towards telco deregulation. Another factor
was the ITU (just down the road from CERN) defending its territory against the
encroachment of the cheeky Internet upstarts.

Retro-fitting a human rights argument to any of this is counterfactual. I 
would
say it was at least 1995 before any human rights argument became relevant.
(That's fact-based. The first time I recall any rights related argument being
raised was during the ITU-organised Geneva Internet Day in March 1995, when
someone asked the panel of white males on stage why there were no women
involved in the Internet. Fortunately I was able to answer that there were
some, but too few, with examples.)

Regards
   Brian Carpenter

On 19-Jul-21 01:47, Andrew G. Malis via Internet-history wrote:
> 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
>> --
>> Internet-history mailing list
>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>