[ih] GOSIP & compliance

[Bill Ricker]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2022 at 1:02 PM Bob Purvy via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> ... to operate TCP/IP networks, noting that the federal mandate, by
>> specifying
>> only procurement, did not prohibit the use of products built around the
>> more familiar and more readily available TCP/IP.*
>>
>
> ... in particular stuck out for me. Admins were required to go OSI, but
> somehow it never happened.  Does anyone have any personal stories to relate
> about this, either your own or someone else's?
>

(I was out of government systems by 1990 but was still talking to MAP
(naturally), so this is my memory of his commentary, plus what has been
discussed here over the last decade. Take with large grain of salt.)

I read this as the mandate tacitly acknowledged that ISO/OSI ISORM- and
GOSIP-compliant products were just not available COTS (Commercial
Off-the-Shelf), such that an injection of procurement $$$ was required to
spur development. (And GOSIP even less so than international OSI.)

In the 1980s, to elucidate the advantage of *working *standards over *paper*
standards, MAP described the ISORM OSI/GOSIP mandated preferred competitor
to the ARPAnet Reference Model & TCP/IP stack as if a teen asks parents for
a car, and is handed a *photograph* of a frame with engine & drivetrain,
four different size wheels mounted, but no body, let alone friperies like
windows or seats.

So anyone doing *Information Technology* with a limited budget and tight
schedule (i.e., without a procurement project manager, procurement budget,
and lengthy government procurement schedule), would just order COTS and
justify it as COTS. (And if necessary, declare the COTS as "only an interim
solution" and sketch vague plans to request additional budget for a
procurement for GOSIP-compliant products in some nebulous glorious future,
provided Congress granted the budget increase needed to do that.)

The "interim" solution of TCP/IP etc Internet protocol stack continues to
mostly function (albeit half-baked as per recent thread).

One might say GOSIP Federal IT is much like the promise of Fusion power
... it has remained 10 years (and many $$) in the future for several
decades. :-D


*Disclosure*: I'm writing historical fiction, mostly because that's what I
> want to do. So there won't be any actual names in whatever I write. I'm
> interested in the private choices people make, not the institutions,
> towering figures, and impersonal forces that most historians write about.
>

Given that angle, i don't know if MAP's memoir "*And They Argued All
Night...*" from 2000 will be of any help at all.
  https://n1vux.github.io/articles/MAP/RFC/allnight.html
(invited memoir essay for *Matrix News* magazine's "*Lest They Forget/Be
Forgotten*" series (Peter H Salus
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_H._Salus>, Ed.), © *2000*)


-- 
Bill Ricker
Executor, Literary & Spiritous Estate of Michael A Padlipsky
<https://n1vux.github.io/articles/MAP/>
bill.n1vux at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux