[ih] Quantifying OSI

[Brian E Carpenter]

> My own summary was that the OSI community did a superb job of marketing, creating a strong demand for open systems, and TCP/IP did a superb job of satisfying the demand.

That's true, but it leaves an impression that the OSI community was just vapourware, which I don't think is fair. The OSI vision was *very* attractive to people (like me) trying to run networking services in a multiprotocol world, and by the mid-1980s OSI was (apparently) well specified and ready to become product. It was very disappointing that it wasn't actually ready and fit for purpose when we needed it (which was, roughly speaking, 1989, for the experiments at LEP, the electron/positron collider). TCP/IP stepped in.

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 12-May-26 12:33, Dave Crocker wrote:
> On 5/11/2026 4:33 PM, Michael Grant via Internet-history wrote:
>> 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. 
> 
> 
> I'll add another thank you for the detailed, cross-culture (networking) life story.
> 
> When I worked for a company that sold TCP/IP stacks, a very large fraction of our revenue came from Europe, the purported hotbed of OSI.  As icing, I like that one of my larger customers the ISO IT team...
> 
> As Einar Stefferud summarized:  “OSI is a beautiful dream, and TCP/IP <https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/tcp-ip> is living it!”
> 
>     https://spectrum.ieee.org/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt
> 
> My own summary was that the OSI community did a superb job of marketing, creating a strong demand for open systems, and TCP/IP did a superb job of satisfying the demand.
> 
> 
> d/
> 
> -- 
> Dave Crocker
> 
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