[ih] Did the MIL-STD matter? [IETF relevance (was Memories of Flag Day?)]

[Jack Haverty]

Interesting.   I hadn't realized the effect that a MIL-STD had outside 
of the US DoD contractor community.

Curious about the history - are there other Internet technologies that 
also became MIL-STDs?   TCPIPV6?  Any of the other IETF Standards?   If 
not, why not...?

Jack

On 9/4/23 15:17, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 05-Sep-23 05:22, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> ...
>
>> Separately, there were efforts, initiated by someone, to orchestrate the
>> "Flag Day" on the Arpanet, to declare TCP/IP a DoD Standard, to define
>> and implement a formal certification program for new TCP
>> implementations, and probably other efforts I never knew about.
>>
>> Someone was in charge, and someone was doing lots of things to "make it
>> work".
>>
>> It wasn't perfect.   Actually it was a bit chaotic IIRC.
>>
>> For example... Jon Postel took on the task of documenting TCP/IPV4 so it
>> could be referenced as a Standard.  RFCs were released.   DoD declared
>> them mandatory for all military systems that involved communicating
>> computers.
>>
>> A bit later, at BBN we were assisting various pieces of the government
>> in getting their computer systems up and running with their vendor's
>> brand-new, certified, standard TCPIPV4s.  It was a big surprise to
>> discover that, although TCP/IP was there, none of the other "tools" we
>> had been using for years had been implemented on those machines.
>>
>> Much of that missing functionality was called "ICMP", well documented in
>> RFC 792.  But only TCP/IP had been declared a DoD Standard. 
>
> This was more important than you might think. The first TCP/IP document
> I ever saw was MIL-STD-1777, and I think that was not uncommon in Europe.
> At the time when a major argument for OSI was "because it's an ISO
> standard, all the vendors will implement it", the fact the TCP/IP wasn't
> just some academic research thingie but was a mandatory US military
> standard was a very powerful argument. It made TCP/IP respectable at
> management level, not just something that a few Unix geeks were keen on.
>
> Certainly when I took over the CERN networking group in early 1985,
> although we expected OSI/CLNP to rule the universe, MIL-STD-1777
> was physically lying on my desk. When I had to walk back CERN's OSI
> policy in the late 1980s, "TCP/IP is a US MIL-STD" was still a
> useful argument.
>
>> Government
>> contractors, who had not been involved in the research community, had to
>> implement the Standard.   But the Standard didn't include ICMP. So they
>> didn't implement it.
>>
>> That made it much more difficult to "make it work".  For example,
>> without ICMP as the Internet's Swiss Army Knife, you couldn't even
>> "ping" a DoD Standard computer.   I remember we raised quite a fuss
>> about that, and implementations started to appear.  I'm not sure if the
>> Standard was ever modified to require ICMP.
>>
>> Other things, like SNMP, were useful but also missing.  Many people
>> apparently didn't consider ICMP and its cohorts to be part of TCP/IP.
>> We considered such technology essential to be able to "make it work".
>
> Nevertheless, TCP/IP "made it" and OSI, which had its own version of the
> same problem, didn't.
>
>      Brian