[ih] OSI and alternate reality

[Daniele Bovio]

David,
One of the major problems at the time was that the PTTs planned to charge
the X.25 traffic by volume, and this would have slowed down the development
of applications enormously, as nobody could have afforded to send images,
sound and videos over the network at an affordable price.
The other issue was that X.25 was limited to E1/DS1 (2Mb), and that was a
severe limitation.
Of course prices would have decreased for packet switched networks as well
after the monopolies fell for good at the end of the 90, and probably some
other X. would have been invented to overcome the E1 limitation of X.25, but
I believe it would have been an uphill road all the way.

Cheers

Daniele


-----Original Message-----
From: Internet-history [mailto:internet-history-bounces at elists.isoc.org] On
Behalf Of David Sitman via Internet-history
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2024 12:19 PM
To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org
Subject: [ih] OSI and alternate reality

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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