[ih] Quantifying OSI

[John Day]

Quite a large number. Equally unmeasurable.

> On May 11, 2026, at 12:07, Bob Purvy via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> "Quantifying" : this is a good way to approach this. Everyone focuses on
> the money, especially from the USG, but there's also "implementation hours":
> 
> How many hours did OSI proponents spend actually writing code and getting
> networks running? Writing papers and going to meetings doesn't count.
> 
> On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:54 AM 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. 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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