[ih] "The Great Debate"

Sun Apr 26 17:26:15 PDT 2026

Hi Jack -

Thanks for your nice note. You asked about Interop videos. I've got a
couple videos up on the Internet Talk Radio archive.

Here's the archive: https://archive.org/details/RT-FM

Here's some Interop-related videos:
https://archive.org/details/RT-FM?and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22movies%22

In regards to Marshall and the OSI question, he gave a memorable speech at
an IETF plenary about how he had implemented OSI and he considered it to be
road kill in motion. He got a standing ovation from Jon Postel and others.
His speech inspired a folk song which played on Internet Talk Radio called
"Road Kill in Motion."
https://archive.org/details/RTFM-Soundbytes-1/940128_byte_IMS.flac

Thanks to David Crocker for reminding me that one of the "Great Debates"
was with Richard desJardins. A mainstream news reporters covered that event
in Communications Week.
https://public.resource.org/scribd/scribd.backup/2556246.pdf

Would still love to get audiotapes of those Interop events.

Best,

Carl

On Sun, Apr 26, 2026 at 9:56 AM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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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