[ih] Quantifying OSI

[Dave Crocker]

Brian,

On 5/11/2026 7:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> That's true, but it leaves an impression that the OSI community was 
> just vapourware, which I don't think is fair. 

Depending on the moment in time and the qualifications for being actual 
'ware', it is absolutely fair.

Unless the view is that having even the smallest bit of software of any 
portion of what is needed makes it not be vaporware.

It was touted for 15 years as /the/ solution.  It delivered, at best, 
small bits of capability -- which I won't honor with the classification 
of 'utility' -- and never at scale.

I suppose X.25 might be considered an exception.  Except that, really, 
that wasn't OSI in terms of what was promoted.



> The OSI vision was *very* attractive to people (like me) trying to run 
> networking services in a multiprotocol world, 

Yes.  As I said, it was a very successful marketing campaign.  It did 
develop market demand.



> and by the mid-1980s OSI was (apparently) well specified and ready to 
> become product. 

Sorry.  No.  Not by any stretch of operational pragmatics, except, 
perhaps, at a department level.  And there were many other, better and 
more mature choices for that market segment.

In fact there was a running joke that OSI was repeatedly promised to be 
ready 'in two years."  I was at a conference in 1990 where Heidi Heiden 
was speaking and he noted this running promise.  He said that while that 
unfortunate history was true, OSI really was almost mature enough for 
production deployment and would be available in 1992.  I, of course, was 
unable to refrain from shouting out a comment on that.



> 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. 

1989 was too late.  As I've noted before, around that time I explored 
customer needs for transitioning from TCP to OSI and without exception 
all I heard from our customers was a very strong need for transitions 
tools in the opposite direction.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker

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