[ih] Quantifying OSI

[John Day]

> On May 11, 2026, at 11:54, Alexander McKenzie via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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.

Speaking of VTP, I had that group working on an enhanced version of Telnet developed by INWG until DEC stepped in screwed it all up taking it back to pedestrian stupidity. But what would you expect?

> 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.

Was that the one for ESTELLE done by Richard Tenney also of BBN at the time. There was a similar code generator develop for the other OSI standard formal description technique, called LOTOS, by the Dutch. ESTELLE and LOTOS were the two developed by ISO. It was possible with both to prove several properties of protocols like progress, no deadlocks, etc. Of course course, CCITT had to have their own called SDL which was less formal. LOTOS was used to prove correctness of the later application protocols like Transaction Processing while they were being developed and provided many corrections.

Take care,
John

> 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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