[ih] A paper

[vinton cerf]

Brian,
I completely agree that the OSI - TCP/IP battle was heavily political. I
was responding to the apparent argument that the TCP/IP design originated
from political motivations.

v


On Sun, Jul 18, 2021 at 4:45 PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
> >> --
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> >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> >>
>
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