[ih] Quantifying OSI

Carl Malamud carl at media.org
Mon May 11 17:05:05 PDT 2026 

Agreed. It is a wonderful story and it very aptly illustrates the scale of
the effort. Thanks for sending.

Carl

On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 5:28 AM Vint Cerf via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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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