[ih] GOSIP & compliance

[Brian E Carpenter]

Bob,

US-GOSIP was not without influence in Europe, and at CERN, although
the European OSI profiles specified X.25 rather than CLNP, we thought
US-GOSIP was the way to go for on-site networking. Our users, the
physicists, used a lot of DECnet in the 1980s, and DEC's strategy
was DECnet/OSI (i.e. DECnet over US-GOSIP). That in itself was not
unaffordable - it was just the next version of DECnet. So it seemed
to be a genuine Route 128 strategy, not a Silicon Valley "strategy".

Around that time, CERN standardised on Motorola 68000s for in-house
microprocessor applications. So off I went to America to look into
CLNP for the 68000 (specifically for the RMS68K operating system).
I remember visiting some software house in Santa Monica. I can't
remember their name, but I know I stayed in a Holiday Inn on Pico
Boulevard, across the road from Santa Monica High. I'm pretty sure
this was in 1983. Anyway - their license for CLNP started at $50,000,
iirc. For a microprocessor. D'oh. We did a homebrew datagram service
instead, subsetting CLNP.

And of course when we asked IBM about CLNP on the mainframe the answer
was equally ridiculous. The IBM "strategy" for OSI came from North
Carolina and had a much higher price tag than anything from Silicon
Valley.

Of course TCP/IP was by then "free" for Unix. Once the Bell license
for Unix ceased to be a problem, it was really free, including our
Cray, Suns, etc., and not too expensive for VAX/VMS, Mac, PC or even
the IBM mainframe. Ben Segal at CERN initially advocated for TCP/IP,
starting in 1985, the same year that we formally proclaimed an OSI
strategy.

It was 1989 when we publicly switched our strategy to TCP/IP.

(More about this is in Chapter 7 "Diversity" of my book. I also
wrote a segment on "The Protocol Wars" which is on pp 106-110
of "A history of international research networking" by Davies
& Bressan.)

Regards
    Brian Carpenter

On 19-Mar-22 06:02, Bob Purvy via Internet-history 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.
>