[ih] OSI and alternate realiv

[John Day]

Yes, the PTTs had no idea what was coming.  As late as the late 1980s, I had people telling me that the amount of data traffic would never exceed the amount voice traffic. (!!) You could only wonder what they were smoking!  ;-)

Also, recent delving into the old papers makes it clear the degree to which the PTTs thwarted the development of comparable networks in Europe, e.g., EIN and EURONET.

> On Mar 15, 2024, at 11:45, Daniele Bovio via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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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