[ih] OSI and alternate reality

[Bob Purvy]

Jack, your description of the meeting structures between the two systems is
spot-on.

If your overriding concern is that everything must be fairly adjudicated,
and moreover, be SEEN to be fair, and all parties have a fair chance to
weigh in, then you end up with the OSI model.

Not only is it slow, but as a rule, no one can be offended by having their
ideas left out.. Therefore, the final product tends to include almost
everything that anyone with any power feels strongly about.

On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 12:00 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 3/15/24 03:19, David Sitman via Internet-history 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
>
> Well, I've always liked sci-fi "alternate reality" stories.  So here's
> some thoughts...
>
> IMHO, both the TCP/IP and OSI approaches were similarly incomplete back
> in the 80s and 90s when the marketplace was choosing the Internet
> approach.   Evidence for that is the deluge of 1000s of RFCs since then,
> containing Standards, Draft Standards, Wannabee Standards, Protocols,
> Algorithms, and other such technical additions that have been deemed
> necessary over the decades and continue today.
>
> Both TCP and OSI technologies were incomplete and needed extensions,
> adaptation, and refinement as the technology hit the issues of the real
> world.   So in thinking about some alternate reality, one has to also
> think about how the technology might have evolved over the same time
> period.
>
> To do that, IMHO the issue is not the technology per se.  Today's
> worldwide communications system could have been built using either OSI
> or TCP approaches, beginning with those 80s-era prototypes and evolving
> them into something quite different today.
>
> So how might that have happened if TCP had just disappeared one day?
>
> I think one of the important drivers of such evolution was the "culture"
> of the two worlds.   The TCP world was somewhat chaotic, with lots of
> ideas flying around and eventually congealing into "rough consensus and
> running code".   The managers and administrators at places like ARPA,
> NSF, et al fostered such an environment, explicitly labelling the work
> as "an Experiment", and encouraging new ideas that were unproven,
> unanalyzed, but might work.
>
> In contrast, the OSI world was much more orchestrated, formal, and
> tightly managed.  I recall one instance in some Internet meeting where a
> discussion focussed on what the default value of some timing parameter
> should be.  Someone shouted out "How about 3 seconds?", and a consensus
> quickly formed that 3 seconds would probably be OK and we could always
> change it later.  In OSI land, a committee would likely have been
> formed, meetings held, and perhaps months or years later some
> recommendation would emerge, yet to be proven in actual deployed
> implementations.
>
> I wasn't involved in much OSI work, but I do recall one meeting,
> somewhere in Europe about some technical topic that I can't recall.
> Progress was actually happening, as the proponents of various choices
> swayed each other toward a consensus, which seemed (to me) to be
> imminent.  Then the Chair interrupted, noting that it was now 3PM and
> therefore time to go on to the agenda item scheduled for that time.  So
> the productive discussion was halted, progress stopped, and the question
> was never resolved, as the meeting focus shifted to the new topic as
> scheduled.
>
> In the TCP community, we would have continued that first discussion
> until consensus was reached, possibly adjourning to some restaurant in
> the interim, and watching the size of the group diminish until only the
> people who really cared about the result remained to hash out a
> solution.   Meetings in the TCP world also often had agendas, but I
> don't recall that we ever finished one as it was scheduled.
>
> Other people have mentioned other aspects of the "culture" differences -
> e.g., the OSI tendency to focus on business models, competitive
> advantages, et al.   IMHO, all of these "cultural differences" would
> have had a significant effect on how OSI might have evolved into an
> alternate reality today.
>
> One example might be videoconferencing.   We probably all have
> experienced today's ubiquitous videoconferencing over the Internet.
> How might that have evolved in an OSI world and how would we do
> videoconferencing today?
>
> In the early 1990s, I was working in Silicon Valley and my company HQ
> used videoconferencing to interact with customers.   We had our own
> corporate "intranet" and were also connected to "The Internet", but
> neither of those had videoconferencing mechanisms available at the
> time.   There were experimental systems such as MBone, but those weren't
> usable for communications with customers outside of the research
> world.   But you could buy videoconferencing equipment and services from
> PTTs.
>
> I don't recall the exact technical details, but in the 90s IIRC
> videoconferencing required use of two ISDN lines.  Those weren't normal
> everyday phone lines, so they were special orders to install the
> appropriate wires, modems,  monitors, cameras, et al into a room made
> for the purpose.   Using the ISDN lines was charged by the minute, but
> all the other costs dominated.   So we had only one special room set up
> for videoconferencing.   It worked amazingly well, providing clear and
> responsive video over just two 64 (or was it 56?) kilobits/sec
> circuits.  But of course few of the thousands of employees at our site
> ever used it, and not many customers had similar setups either.
>
> What would such a system look like today if TCP had disappeared as it
> was expected to do and replaced by OSI?
>
> Personally, I don't have a clue, but I can imagine lots of
> possibilities.  Given the slow pace of OSI's culture, we might be still
> using those ISDN lines.   Or perhaps the "TCP Culture" would have
> infiltrated the OSI community and produced 1000s of OSI RFCs despite the
> Chairs' attempts to exert control?  It might have happened either way.
>
> But I think we can see some clues even today about how the OSI culture
> remains.   Just a week or so ago, I read a bit about the emerging "5G"
> cellular technology and in particular about its use of "Network Slices"
> to segregate traffic based on whether it is video, audio, interactive,
> bulk, etc.  One of the possibilities of using such a scheme is to apply
> different costs to each category.   So a video call might cost more per
> minute than an audio one.   All bits are not created equal.   Some are
> more lucrative than others.
>
> In contrast, TCP-thinkers believe that all data is just bits.  It also
> seems that current thinking is that bandwidth is ubiquitous, free, and
> plentiful - although there are some anomalies like "data caps" that
> belie that thinking.
>
> That wasn't always true.  Back in the early Internet, as TCPV4 was being
> defined, a "Type Of Service" (TOS) field was placed in each datagram
> header, reflecting a belief that there would be different kinds of bits
> that required different treatment as they were carried through the
> Internet.  Some bits, like those containing the next frame of video,
> aren't useful if they arrive too late to be used in creating the frame
> that was just displayed.
>
> Over the decades however, the importance of TOS seems to have waned in
> the culture of today's Internet, with little (if any) attention now paid
> to TOS.  Functions used by mechanisms such as MBone haven't spread.  We
> have new terms such as "bufferbloat" to explain how today's Internet
> behaves.   All bits are created equal.  None are more important than
> others or need different handling.
>
> So, if OSI had "won" and the technology had evolved to include features
> such as "Network Slices" what would videoconferencing today look like?
>
> Perhaps it would still be expensive, requiring special rooms, equipment
> and ISP services, and as a consequence very limited in use - quite
> different from today's world where anyone, individual or huge
> corporation, can interact by video with their customers, families,
> friends, and colleagues.
>
> Such interactions have become critical for many users of today's
> Internet.  But we have all gotten used to, and accept, the occasional
> glitches - the visual and audible dropouts, dropped connections,
> "buffering!" interruptions, and such characteristics of today's service.
>
> In an OSI-based world, perhaps video uses would be more expensive and
> less pervasive.   But perhaps the video quality would have been 99.99%
> perfect.
>
> Jack Haverty
>
>
>
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