[ih] Why did TCP win? [Re: Internet-history Digest, Vol 63, Issue 3

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 04-Feb-25 11:02, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> 
>> I believe that was to use TCP/IP as the transport since you couldn't
>> count on an OSI implementation.
> 
> When people claim that Internet folk were antagonistic to OSI, they
> conveniently leave out efforts like Rose's ISODE.
> 
> Arguably, Internet folk did a lot more to try to make OSI useful than
> the OSI community did.

Right. For example, at CERN we deployed EAN (freeware from UBC), which
attempted to bridge X.400 and RFC822. It supported RFC987. I was still
expecting X.400 to take off in 1989, but a couple of years later I recall
writing a script to convert EAN's file structure into MBOX format as
our few remaining EAN users (including me) wanted to convert to ELM.

If you really want a flavour of the email mess in those days, here's
a CERN internal status report:
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/2806521/files/Dimou-email-status-report-1989.pdf

    Brian