[ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 52, Issue 4

[Dave Crocker]

On 3/15/2024 7:19 AM, Andrew Odlyzko via Internet-history wrote:
> But I am pretty sure that if the Internet had not come out
> when it did, what the public sees and does would have turned
> out pretty much the same,


I believe there is nothing in the nature of what was happening then to 
support this view, and quite a lot of what was happening that counters 
this view.  The entire range of OSI work demonstrates this rather 
forcefully, I believe.

Technical work is heavily influenced by the culture and skills of the 
team(s) producing it.  The Internet's world differed fundamentally from 
that of classic communications standards efforts.

The chapter I did, "Evolving the system" In Internet System Handbook, D. 
Lynch, and M. Rose, eds., is about the IETF standards process and 
offered some comparison between Internet (IETF) and International (OSI) 
approach to doing this work.  (A revised version of the chapter was 
published separately.)

Making standards the IETF way | StandardView <#>

🔗 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/174683.174689 
<https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/174683.174689>


There were commonly-held views in both communities about limitations and 
problems with the 'other' community.  In my experience, most of these 
assessments were wrong.  What I saw uniformly were bright, 
well-motivated, knowledgeable people trying to solve things well.  
(However, yes, in the CCITT world there was an ingrained requirement to 
keep PTTs at the center. X.400 relaxed this, eventually, but far too 
late to matter.)

The biggest difference I saw was in the approach to resolving competing 
approaches.  The international folk tend to include each one as an 
alternative.  The Internet folk (back then) tended to choose one.  This 
also applied to the inclusion of features.  One tended to include lots 
of features.  The other few.

And, of course, one tended to have (relatively) aggressive schedules, 
wanting the work to be in fielded products yesterday. The other went for 
years without being able to field a widely-usable service.

These differences produce wildly different designs.  If the Internet 
community had not existed, we know exactly what we would have been stuck 
with. And it is nothing like what we now have.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
mast:@dcrocker at mastodon.social