[ih] Quantifying OSI

[Carl Malamud]

Thanks everybody for your contributions and memories on this thread. Very
helpful and interesting.

As to the comment about how this discourse is akin to shooting a dead
horse, I believe we need to learn from history or we will be doomed to
repeat it, and sometimes that means shooting a dead horse again.

Like many of you, I spent a lot of time looking at OSI. I spent thousands
of dollars buying specs and many many hours trying to figure out what this
was all about for my book on Decnet Phase V, a book I now think of as
"paperware about vaporware." My book on Novell networks certainly sold much
better.

Best regards,

Carl


On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 7:58 AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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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