[ih] "The Great Debate"

[Jack Haverty]

Hi Carl!

And welcome!  For any who don't know, Carl has been around the Internet 
for a long time. I remember him wandering around the floors of the 
Interop shows with a camera, interviewing whoever would stand still long 
enough to talk about this newfangled (then) "Internet" activity.

This list is a historical re-enactment of the Internet meetings of the 
1980s.  Asking a question about something could easily trigger intense 
debates about other topics.  In email lists it was called "Flame Wars".  
At Internet meetings it triggered the creation of an entirely new 
protocol, called the "Rathole Protocol".   As the sci-fi writers say, 
"Shields Up!"

I have some Interop tapes, mostly of seminars that I presented and 
Interop gave me a tape as a souvenir.  Sadly I no longer have any device 
that can play them.  So I don't have a copy of the TCP/OSI debates.  But 
you might find them online.  I just checked archive.org and there are 
some audio artifacts from Interop there - see 
https://archive.org/search?tab=audio&query=interop+

This list has been active for a long time, and has an archive of past 
posts.   I'm pretty sure the topic of Interop, and possibly the tapes, 
has been discussed before, but I can't remember the details, and it's 
not easy to search (for humans at keyboards).  I've wondered if someone 
might figure out how to connect some AI to that archive to answer 
questions like yours.

By the way, are your old videos from Interop online?  I tried 
https://archive.org/search?tab=movies&query=malamud and there's quite a 
lot of material there but I didn't see any Interop artifacts at a 
cursory glance.   I suspect there's a lot of Internet History captured 
in all sorts of Interop artifacts - audio, video, even vendor handouts.

It could have been worse.  Be glad you didn't ask about TCP and SNA - 
which unlike OSI did get implemented, with significant operational 
experience well before TCP.  Circa 2008 IBM surrendered and announced 
SNA was evolving and would use IP as its foundation layer.   But I don't 
recall any debates about TCP versus SNA. Whether that was on the 
Voldermort Enumeration or not?  Don't have a clue....

Enjoy!
/Jack Haverty


On 4/26/26 07:22, Carl Malamud via Internet-history wrote:
> John -
>
> I was simply asking if anybody had an audiocassette tape I could digitize
> as part of my research for a new book I'm working on. I didn't realize that
> the mere mention of Marshall was a violation of the terms of use of this
> list. Are there other names I should avoid mentioning, some kind of a
> Internet History Voldermort Enumeration I should be made aware of before I
> commit further infractions?
>
> Carl
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 26, 2026 at 7:04 AM John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>> 🔗 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/
>>
>> --
>> Dave Crocker
>> dhc at dcrocker.net
>> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
>> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
>> +1.408.329.0791
>>
>> Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter
>> Northern California Coastal Region
>> Information & Planning Coordinator
>> American Red Crossdave.crocker2 at redcross.org
>>
>>
>>

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