[ih] Quantifying OSI

Mon May 11 16:57:50 PDT 2026

wow, quite a story!
v

On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 7:33 PM Michael Grant via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Hey The Event, I was heavily involved in that!  I worked at COS then.  I
> build and ran the testing lab at COS where all the vendors came in and
> set up their stuff.  I also did a lot of conformance testing of OSI back
> then.  Spent a lot of time in front of data scopes reading tcpdump like
> traces to figure out why things couldn't communicate.  It was often an
> addressing issue.
>
> To learn the protocol stack, I made myself a set of protocol cheat
> sheets that looked like the ascii diagrams in the RFCs.  I gave copies
> to a bunch of people but was eventually told I couldn't distribute them
> because they contained potentially copyrighted material from the CCITT
> books.  Not sure I still have those files around any more.
>
> We, the tech folks, wanted, needed badly to get on the internet back
> then.  We ended up first mostly communicating using uucp to some of the
> vendors others, it was fax.  The management forbade us to get a ppp
> dialup line for several years.  It was laughable that we used uucp and
> couldn't get x.400 working and I tried hard.  Marshall Rose gave me a
> set of ISODE tapes which I spent days and days trying to get something
> talking to something outside of COS.  If I recall, the issue was not
> exactly ISODE but everything else around it.  There was simply no OSI
> Internet.  You couldn't just get an X.25 connection and be on the OSI
> net.  Nobody sold CLNP but you could do it over ethernet.  Nobody in
> that time period ever imagined a telco dropping in a 10mbps ethernet
> port and giving you pure CLNP, anything outside your own premise was to
> be X.25 or maybe ISDN.  On the application side, I don't recall, I don't
> think ISODE X.400 talked to sendmail, it may have, i just can't
> remember.  Sun's X.400 definitely talked to sendmail though and from
> memory, I had ISODE X.400 talking to Sun's X.400 but it was very much in
> a lab playground.  There was no authority to assign you a real globally
> unique X.400 mail address, we simply made it up.  There was no way to
> route a message.  There literally were no hostnames in OSI like in
> TCP/IP!
>
> Then there were no less than 5 different variants of transport named TP0
> to TP4.  Basically you ran TP0 over X.25 and TP4 over CLNP.  Nobody
> could tell me what happened if you had one end on TP0 and another on
> TP4!  Somehow X.500 was going to save the day and there would be some
> sort of application layer gateway somewhere!  Literally we had a
> building (well, a couple floors of a building) filled with some of the
> most clued up people on OSI and I talked to everyone and nobody had good
> answers for the most basic questions of how this stuff was really
> supposed to work.  It was just a job.  They were just doing stuff
> because they were told to by higher ups.  Nobody I worked with at COS at
> the technical level believed this stuff was actually going to go
> prime-time and everyone would be using it.
>
> Anyway, yeah, The Event, that was a load of fun.  That was possibly the
> only time in the history of OSI that there was a small diverse group of
> vendors equipment that actually talked to each other.  After it
> disbanded, everyone went home.  There was never any way even anyone at
> COS could use any of the stuff to communicate with anyone.  We couldn't
> even send an x.400 message to anyone after that.   After The Event, it
> was pretty much down hill.  I talked to people internally at COS to see
> if we could do something like Interop but there was no money, no desire
> to do it.  We sold a bunch of these super expensive OSI testers that ran
> on Sun hardware and basically even if you passed the test suite, you
> still wouldn't be able to talk to another implementation without a
> stupid amount of config such that there really was no way ever to build
> an internet with this stuff.  Then the vendors started pulling out of
> the consortium and then layoffs started.
>
> I left COS for Sun and worked on federal bid & proposals for a couple
> years where we saw the check-box requirement over and over from the US
> Gov't and it was my job to tick those boxes with Sun's OSI
> implementation.  There, I met the folks at Sun France and they hired me
> away from Sun Fed and I moved to Grenoble France where I could have
> worked on Sun's OSI stack but by then, it was gathering dust and I ended
> up working on SNMP and LDAP.  I recall that Sun didn't even make its own
> OSI stack, much of it was outsourced to some French company.  I looked
> at it a bit but the source was fairly impenetrable.  Nothing was well
> integrated into SunOS.  Very messy.  It was quite clear there was no
> internal commitment to do this right.
>
> Anyway, from start to finish of this episode of my life, I could never
> understand how this stuff would really work and boy oh boy did I try to
> make it work.  Nobody around me either gave a crap if it worked.  Nobody
> around me at the technical level believed this stuff would overtake
> tcp/ip which was getting more and more popular and more and more
> companies were getting hooked in.  Once you had a ppp connection, a
> domain name, and started getting e-mail (if you hadn't already been
> getting mail over uucp), you had not one iota of need or desire to get
> x.400 working, nor anything else in that stack for that matter.  X.500
> morphed into LDAP and that morphed into Microsoft Active Directory
> though LDAP still exists though I don't really know why people use it.
>
> I had wondered for a long time why LDAP hadn't become some sort of
> Internet like telephone directory.  It would have been a nice place to
> store things like PGP keys in but it never really took off on a global
> scale.  No one ever published their contact details publicly in LDAP.
> Clearly this would have been a spammers dream to be able to just look up
> everyone's address.
>
> Aside from LDAP, I have run across things using ASN.1.  I don't off hand
> know if anything more than those subsets of OSI are still in use today.
>
> ------ Original Message ------
> From "Tom Lyon via Internet-history" <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> To "Brian E Carpenter" <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com>
> Cc internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> Date 11/05/2026 22:43:10
> Subject Re: [ih] Quantifying OSI
>
> >Anyone else remember the Enterprise Network Event - 1988 in Baltimore?
> >It was the peak of hype for the MAP/TOP flavor of OSI, complete with IEEE
> >802.4.
> >Sun announced such a product there.  Don't know if we ever sold any, but
> it
> >got us past the dreaded corporate check-lists.
> >
> >
> https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/14.10/Enterprise-Network-Event-(OSI)-June/
> >
> >On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:22 PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <
> >internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >
> >>  Yes, there was *enormous* expenditure by major companies worldwide that
> >>  thought OSI was the key to the future. IBM had people working on
> SNA/OSI
> >>  integration (including marketing vapourware), both in the US (Research
> >>  Triangle Park) and Europe (La Gaude). DEC (mainly at Littleton, MA)
> >>  invested many millions in DECNET Phase V. Boeing also spent millions,
> I'm
> >>  sure; I have no knowledge about GM. Untold numbers of companies spent
> both
> >>  marketing and development millions under the influence of US-GOSIP,
> >>  UK-GOSIP, European Commission policy, etc. Not to mention startups who
> >>  thought OSI was an enormous future opportunity. I imagine that this was
> >>  largely limited to North America, Western Europe and Japan, but it
> >>  certainly included a lot more than sending people to meetings. I have
> no
> >>  idea how to estimate the total but I suspect the correct unit is
> probably
> >>  the gigadollar.
> >>
> >>  The emerging national research and education networks in Europe also
> spent
> >>  large fractions of their budgets on OSI preparedness - probably much
> less
> >>  money than industry was spending, but real enough, between about 1985
> and
> >>  the early 1990s. The same went for NASA and DoE in the US.
> >>
> >>  Standards goers and their fine lunches and dinners were probably quite
> a
> >>  small fraction of the real total cost.
> >>
> >>  Regards/Ngā mihi
> >>      Brian Carpenter
> >>
> >>  On 12-May-26 08:43, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote:
> >>  > Our company (Epilogue Tech.) was involved with ISO/OSI mostly via the
> >>  > MAP and TOP efforts by General Motors and Boeing.
> >>  >
> >>  > Those gatherings tended to be somewhat well attended, although I
> don't
> >>  > think many of the attendees were people who actually implemented
> things.
> >>  >
> >>  >           --karl--
> >>  >
> >>  > On 5/11/26 3:46 AM, John Day via Internet-history wrote:
> >>  >> That would be hard to calculate for the US. There were 5 OSI main
> >>  committees each with 15 - 20 or more participants in various
> subgroups. In
> >>  the US, US corporations paid for the time and travel of their
> participants.
> >>  Some companies (IBM, Honeywell, ATT, etc) would have multiple
> participants
> >>  in the same committee. There were multiple US meetings between major
> >>  international meetings every 9 months and international sub-group
> meetings
> >>  between the 9 month major meetings.
> >>  >>
> >>  >> The cost was all paid by the companies participating. In addition,
> >>  there were 802 meetings that were feeding into the OSI work. This was
> >>  especially true of how network management was gotten off the dime to
> get
> >>  around IBM stonewalling. All other 802 standards were process by an ISO
> >>  committee, because some countries saw IEEE as a US organization.
> >>  >>
> >>  >> I wouldn’t even hazard a guess at how many people or companies were
> >>  participating from the US. The Europeans did complain sometimes abut
> the
> >>  large US delegations to the meetings.
> >>  >>
> >>  >> Take care,
> >>  >> John Day
> >>  >>
> >>  >>
> >>  >>
> >>  >>> On May 10, 2026, at 23:53, Carl Malamud via Internet-history <
> >>  internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >>  >>>
> >>  >>> Hi -
> >>  >>>
> >>  >>> I’m trying to quantify the size of the OSI efforts. I’ve seen the
> 25
> >>  >>> million ECU investment by the EU, and have some pointers to US
> >>  government
> >>  >>> efforts. Has anybody tried to collect these numbers?
> >>  >>>
> >>  >>> Also very interested in non-monetary indicators. I have easy
> access to
> >>  >>> number of IETF participants and count the traffic on mailing
> lists. Any
> >>  >>> similar metrics for OSI? The best indicator so far is “many fine
> >>  lunches
> >>  >>> and dinners” but surely there has to be something more scientific.
> >>  >>>
> >>  >>> With best regards,
> >>  >>>
> >>  >>> Carl
> >>  >>> --
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