[ih] Fwd: Fw: Quantifying OSI

[Alexander McKenzie]

Others from BBN who worked on the NIST contract to represent "the US
Government's view" in OSI committees included John Burress (Transport
Layer), e (Presentation Layer) and Kathy Huber (terminal support in the
Application Layer, IIRC).  However the majority of our work was done in
committees of ANSI, where the "US position" was developed.  ANSI meetings
were roughly every 3 months. Between meetings we developed position papers
based on input from NIST and from ARPAnet/Internet experience. As part of
this project Tom Blumer developed a protocol compiler which took in a
"formal" description of a protocol in a c-like language describing a
protocol state machine and output a procedure implementing the protocol.
However, any progress we made in getting the OSI system to resemble the
good parts of ARPAnet/Internet experiments was summarily dismissed by
people like Jon Postel, Dave Clark, and Mike Padlisky as "Not Invented
Here" when we attempted to report back to the ARPAnet/Internet community.
Ultimately it didn't much matter; the superior funding of implementations
by ARPA, and the "give it away freely" attitude toward those
implementations, carried the day.

Cheers,
Alex

*From:* Craig Partridge via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
*To:* Carl Malamud <carl at media.org>
*Cc:* Carl Malamud via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
*Sent:* Monday, May 11, 2026 at 10:48:43 AM EDT
*Subject:* Re: [ih] Quantifying OSI

For a chunk of time, NIST funded a bunch of BBN folks to attend including
Ross Callon (whom, I understand, did a big chunk of the heavy lifting on
CLNP) and Debbie Deutsch (ASN.1 and I think parts of X.400).  They used to
meet in the cafeteria periodically to brush up on their (I think French?)
language skills.

Craig

On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:29 AM Carl Malamud via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Guessing NIST had a ton of employees going to ISO meetings, perhaps a FOIA
> request (or several) is in order. Imagine they will have copies of meeting
> minutes, enough to start to estimate the number of attendees and number of
> meetings.
>
>

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