[ih] "The Great Debate"

[John Day]

I always considered Marshall’s ISODE implementation as a classical example of of how not to implement OSI. It was so bad, I always considered it more an attempt to trash OSI than promote it. We had implementations orders of magnitude smaller and faster.

Yes there was a lot of crap in in the standards forced on it by the Europeans and their PTTs. It was important to know what to ignore. But then that was not Marshall’s intent.



> On Apr 26, 2026, at 09:34, Dave Crocker <dhc at dcrocker.net> wrote:
> 
> On 4/26/2026 6:15 AM, John Day via Internet-history wrote:
>> That must have been an interesting debate considering neither one of them was participating in OSI or had any idea what was going on.
> 
> The OSI world had a basic difficulty gaining operational experience, the way the Internet community did.  Marshall's ISODE package did more for helping OSI applications to get field experience than anything that came from within the OSI community.
> 
> en.wikipedia.org
> 
> ISO Development Environment - Wikipedia <x-msg://35/#>
> 
> 🔗 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_Development_Environment <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_Development_Environment>
> 
> 
> If remember correctly, this event was the one that Marshall presented first and when it was Paul's turn, he said he'd just use Marshall's slides.  Marshall said that as soon as Paul said that, he knew Paul would trounce him...
> 
> 
> 
> d/
> 
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> Dave Crocker
> 
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