[ih] OSI and alternate reality

[Andrew G. Malis]

Back in the day, while I was at BBN, I worked on the GOSIP specs in
addition to my work on the ARPAnet and TCP/IP, so I have some familiarity
with the topic. INMO, I can imagine an alternate reality where if TCP/IP
hadn't taken off as it did for whatever reason, then OSI would have taken
its place, but things would have just been delayed. There's no reason why,
if the specs had been made freely available and with the same effort put
into interoperability testing, congestion control, and such that happened
for TCP/IP, that OSI IP and TP4 wouldn't eventually have worked as well.

Cheers,
Andy


On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 6:19 AM David Sitman via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> In my talk at the EARN 40th Anniversary Conference in Athens in April I
> would like to speculate a bit about what the world would be like today if
> OSI had won the "Protocol Wars".
> In 1986, it was a foregone conclusion that EARN would migrate to OSI in the
> near future. However, when I began my international activity in 1991, OSI
> was discussed as a promise that had gone largely unfulfilled and EARN
> members were actively supporting TCP/IP networks. It seemed obvious why
> TCP/IP had prevailed.
> Would we have seen the same rapid and universal adoption of computer
> networking with OSI? Could the Web have flourished? Would address space and
> security issues be alleviated? Would "OSI on Everything" have become a
> meme?
> I would be very grateful for any thoughts about this.
>
> Thanks,
> David Sitman
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