[ih] Quantifying OSI

[Brian E Carpenter]

> Decnet Phase V, a book I now think of as "paperware about vaporware." 

Actually, that was definitely not vapourware, it was deployable and deployed, just in time for the VAX market to disappear.

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 12-May-26 17:43, Carl Malamud via Internet-history wrote:
> 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
>>
>> dhc at dcrocker.net
>> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
>> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
>> +1.408.329.0791
>>
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>> dave.crocker2 at redcross.org
>>
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