[ih] Installed base momentum (was Re: Design choices in SMTP)

[John Day]

One other very late reply. The context was more or less set by Craig a long time ago:

> I would argue that a critical issue was communicating outside one's
> organization and/or over long distance.  The various technologies you list,
> except for DECNET, did not focus on solving problems across organizational
> boundaries.  Recall Netware was the
> biggest networking technology of the time and, while it adapted somewhat,
> was designed to connect an office or suite
> of offices.

As to why OSI failed:
The big reason was the internal dissension. Nothing good could be done unless you were looking far enough ahead that the phone companies didn’t know it was important. Inviting the phone companies to join the effort was a mistake but at the time, Europe didn’t have much choice. The battle over connection/connectionless was fought tooth and nail there and compromise on every word. The result was not pretty. They also wrecked the Session Layer by making it not about sessions.

Another minor contributor was that the major companies participating in the effort were targeting corporate networks which were the market at the time. There was no market yet for the Internet (it was coming, but was a ways off). Of course, that changed precipitously with the Web. The Internet was there with free software and an installed base and the major companies were caught flat-footed. (All through the OSI effort, it was amazing how little the commercial world was aware of the ARPANET/Internet.

All in all, OSI killed itself with its internal dissension. Not only computer companies vs phone companies, but the computer companies were warring with each other to be the leaders and kept re-fighting the discussions in the standards committees over and over in NBS/NIST workshops, and COS, remember COS?

Some good results did come out of it, but they were so well hidden by the phone company screw ups few noticed.

Take care,
John