[ih] GOSIP & compliance

Fri Mar 18 14:45:58 PDT 2022

I was that guy along with Andrew Partan who worked for COS who got COS on the internet, well, what became the Internet.  We simply couldn’t do anything without being connected to the net.  Nothing happened over X.400 and no files were ever transferred over FTAM.  We had Suns on our desks, Sun servers in the computer room which I helped run, and were connected to Uunet via a telebit modem.  Prior to that, we had UUCP dialup to Uunet.  I remember very distinctly that the members of the consortium asked us to use the OSI protocols for our own stuff but we basically ignored them.  In fact, even internally at COS there was a Wang system and the Suns and we couldn’t even connect their email systems together.  About the closest we could come was we played with Marshall Rose’s ISODE.  Honestly, there wasn’t even a single way to get a fully connected network when some computers were running TP0, others TP4 and no way to interconnect!  And there wasn’t a single router that routed CLNP.  Did one ever exist?  There were serious fundamental problems with OSI.

I got hired away by Sun from COS when it imploded and eventually worked with the OSI team in France which eventually pivoted to LDAP.  Sun’s OSI product was not written at Sun.  I don’t recall the vender, they were French.  It was taken in house and essentially ported to SunOS.  It was pretty robust for what it was but quite over complicated and very difficult to debug.  It was never really fully integrated into SunOS, and then we kind of silently stopped supporting it.  If I recall correctly, there was only FTAM, X.400, and maybe X.500.  I don’t really recall the network stack below these application layers but I know they were there because I had tested them at COS.

About the biggest interoperability that I ever saw was this trade show which we called The Event in Baltimore around 1990 which COS had a booth demonstrating about a dozen vendors able to transfer files and send mail to one another.  It was a mini Interop.  Took a couple years to actually put together and was good fun.  After that things seemed to fall apart.  Bill, you and I must have interacted back then.

It was “strategic” in that it checked some box for some gov’t contracts which nobody ever intended on using.

From: Bill Nowicki via Internet-history
Sent: 18 March 2022 21:26
To: Bob Purvy; Andrew G. Malis
Cc: internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> Internet History
Subject: Re: [ih] GOSIP & compliance

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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