[ih] OSI and alternate reality

[Dave Crocker]

>  From a purely technical standpoint, without any of the
> bureaucratic barriers ISO IP and TP4 could have been the basis for the
> Internet.


It is pretty much always true that if things had been different, things 
would be different.

It is also true that a) things taken in isolation often look much better 
than when taken in aggregation, and b) a thing that is proposed or even 
implemented in small scale can look far more appealing than something 
tested at scale.

As an integrated design, OSI was vastly too complex, notably incomplete, 
and vastly under-tested.  That portions of it had good and possibly 
superior design is largely irrelevant to the question of history.

So, for example, the fact that CLNP had a larger address space sounds 
obviously appealing, until one notes a lack of design and testing for 
the use of those bits.  At scale.  A problem that troubled IPv6, too.

The technical, operational, economic, and political realities of the two 
communities were profoundly different.  If the Internet community had 
not existed, we would have had some sort of global, digital service, but 
it would have been or been like what the global, telecom standards 
community in fact produced.  And that is nothing like what we now have.  
In spite of bits of it being similar.

d/

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