[ih] GOSIP & compliance

[Brian E Carpenter]

It wasn't just NASA and it certainly wasn't just Ames. ESA (the European Space Agency) also planned to migrate to Phase V, and so did the intercontinental High Energy Physics DECnet, which interworked with the space science DECnet. Denise Heagerty was in charge of that for CERN. Phase V worked (from some time in 1993, I think) but it didn't last and the physics DECnet died by about 1998 as the physicists switched to *ix and TCP/IP (and, of course, DEC vanished).

See page 11 at https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nssdc_news/nssdc_news_06_02.pdf/ . I would have thought Milo Medin was at that meeting, so maybe he skipped the photo. The day after that meeting**, I met with Steve Goldstein at NSF HQ to discuss boosting transatlantic IP connectivity.

In my book I wrote: "The end of that story is a sad one: we just about got the high-energy physics DECnets converted to Phase V when it was time to switch them off, since everyone had started using TCP/IP instead."

[If anybody cares about details contact me off list. But I'll have to ask 
Denise.]

The main upside of moving to Phase V was that it got rid of "hidden areas" which was DECnet Phase IV's hack for running out of address space. (That was the main source of my unconditional hatred of NAT.)

At the same time, we were telling DEC they needed to get the DECnet upper 
layers running over TCP/IP, but that was a hard message to get across. However, HP to this day has a support page entitled "DECnet/OSI - Configuring a Node to Use DECnet/OSI Over TCP/IP". It cites RFC 1006 (a.k.a. STD 35).

Regards
    Brian Carpenter

** Utterly irrelevant: The Hubble telescope had been launched a couple of 
weeks earlier, and its defective mirror was in the process of being discovered right then. Our hosts wanted to show us the Hubble control room at Goddard, but it was all closed up with the curtains drawn across the viewing windows. They were very puzzled; the defect wasn't announced in public until three weeks later.

On 23-Mar-22 12:37, Tony Li via Internet-history wrote:
> 
> Hi Bob,
> 
> I was something of a spectator.  Milo Medin and Jeff Burgan are authoritative.
> 
> NASA’s network started off as DECnet and painfully migrated to DECnet Phase V (i.e. OSI). So it’s correct, OSI wasn’t totally, officially dead yet. But it was VERY clear that to talk to anyone else, it was IP.
> 
> T
> 
> 
>> On Mar 22, 2022, at 3:57 PM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>> Is anyone familiar with NASA Ames' internal network history? I found this
>> document
>> <https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19910002112/downloads/19910002112.pdf>
>> (disclaimer:
>> which I haven't read yet), which seems to indicate OSI wasn't *totally,
>> officially* dead by the 90s
>>
>> (I see Vint in the Acknowledgements.)
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 9:13 AM Francesco Fondelli <
>> francesco.fondelli at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> In Italy we had Videotel, similar to Minitel. I never had a Videotel
>>> terminal (was expensive and yes paid by the minute) but in the 90s you
>>> could connect with a V.23/V.21 (?) modem to ITAPAC (X.25 network) and
>>> somehow access some of the Videotel services (at local per-call-rate... 200
>>> lire IIRC).
>>>
>>> I think Videotel main app was... chat.
>>>
>>> Still have the phone numbers of some ITAPAC "gateway"...
>>>
>>> ciao
>>>
>>> On Sun, Mar 20, 2022 at 9:05 PM Bob Purvy via Internet-history <
>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> It apparently made France Telecom a lot of money since users paid
>>>> by the minute, but I think they were kind of embarrassed by the whole
>>>> thing.
>>>>
>>>> I believe we now have a corollary to the theorem:
>>>>
>>>> *'Strategic' means you don't make any money.*
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> It's:
>>>>
>>>> * If you're making money, it's not strategic.*
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Mar 20, 2022 at 10:45 AM John R. Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>> Well, don't people in France ever want to look up numbers in Germany,
>>>>>> England, and Italy?
>>>>>
>>>>> Perhaps, but historically the way that worked is that each national
>>>> telco
>>>>> had operators in a room full of out of date foreign phone books.  I
>>>> doubt
>>>>> any of the telcos would have found that compelling.
>>>>>
>>>>>> Also, there were lots of other apps on top of Minitel, including a
>>>> dating
>>>>>> service! It did replace calls for directory assistance, but then
>>>> people
>>>>>> discovered it could do a lot of other things, too.
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, I know.  In our 1995 Internet Secrets, we had a chapter on Minitel
>>>>> Rose.  It apparently made France Telecom a lot of money since users 
paid
>>>>> by the minute, but I think they were kind of embarassed by the whole
>>>>> thing.
>>>>>
>>>>> It is a reasonable question why other PTTs didn't just clone Minitel,
>>>> but
>>>>> I don't think at the time there would have been much incentive to hook
>>>>> them together.  Apparently they did trials in Belgium and Ireland, but
>>>>> without the PTT subsidy to provide the terminals for free, they didn't
>>>> go
>>>>> anywhere.
>>>>>
>>>>> Regards,
>>>>> John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for
>>>>> Dummies",
>>>>> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail.
>>>> https://jl.ly
>>>>>
>>>> --
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>>>>
>>>
>> -- 
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>