[ih] GOSIP & compliance

[Bill Nowicki]

 I was a bit involved in this at the time. My role was the lone TCP/IP guy at Sun Microsystems during the1980s, while we had a dedicated team doing the OSI stack. That was because the assumption in the marketing world was that TCP/IP was "for research and education", while commercial and government production users would use OSI. It was especially amusing to hear that the Corporation for Open Systems, the group formed to promote the OSI stack, itself used TCP/IP (including PC NFS for file sharing, that was leading edge technology at the time) on its internal systems.  I especially remember having a lunch with Milo Medin, who ran the network at NASA's Ames Research Center nearby. He pointed out that the letter of the law was that the vendor needed to show it supplied the OSI stack (it was available and actually worked to some extent), not that each US government customer needed to actually buy it. That is one reason why the revenues from Sun's OSI product were fairly trivial; TCP/IP was included in the OS for no extra charge. The Sun marketing called this a "strategic" product. Which became the running joke in Silicon Valley: whenever a product was a powerful person's pet idea but generated no revenue, it was called "strategic".
Bill
    On Friday, March 18, 2022, 11:34:59 AM PDT, Andrew G. Malis via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
 It's been a while, but as I recall, as a part of this requirement,
TCP/IP-to-OSI transition plans were necessary. While I was at BBN, I wrote
such a transition plan for the MILNET (or it might have been for the DoD as
a whole, as I said, things are hazy). I'm sure that it just went on a shelf
somewhere once the requirement for a plan was met.

Cheers,
Andy


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

> I was around for all this, but probably not as much as some of you. So many
> memories fade...
>
> I've been reading this
> <
> https://courses.cs.duke.edu//common/compsci092/papers/govern/consensus.pdf
> >.
> This passage...
>
>
> *By August 1990, federal agencies were required to procure
> GOSIP-compliantproducts. Through this procurement requirement, the
> government intended to stimulate the market for OSI products. However, many
> network administrators resisted the GOSIP procurement policy and continued
> 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?
>
> *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.
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