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

[Miles Fidelman]

I recall that, when I first arrived at BBN, I was handed several books:
The Original Unix & C books,
Comer & Tannenbaum on data networking,
The DoD Protocol Handbook - containing the TCP/IP, FTP, and SMTP 
standards (maybe a couple more).

All seminal references during my BBN years, and for many years afterwards.

Miles Fidelman


Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history 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


-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown