[ih] Quantifying OSI

Tue May 12 13:51:20 PDT 2026

Here is another data point on relative resources: at Sun Microsystems through the 1980s at least, much more was spent on OSI than on TCP/IP.

Marketing was saying that only a few research customers were ever going to use TCP on BSD Sockets, and those had discounts. The real money, they said confidently, was in what customers wanted: OSI using AT&T Stream interfaces. They also salivated over software "products" like OSI, whereas TCP was included at no extra cost in the OS, subsidized by hardware sales.

There was a moderate-sized group (for Sun) doing OSI, with a large budget flying to meetings in D.C. and Europe. Meanwhile, I had been hired into the operating systems group, where the main project was the Network File System (NFS). Engineering management and many engineers were from the University of California at Berkeley or Stanford, so were already addicted to Internet email. They gave me free reign to work on TCP as long as I kept the cost under the radar. I updated TCP code from Van Jacobson with little effort, and supported DNS since we needed it work around scalability issues and many other limitations of our rudimentary network naming service. I was able to drive myself to most of the End-to-End Research Group meetings, and Dan Lynch shows on the West Coast, so did not need much travel budget. We justified our own Internet connection because it saved the phone budget of all those UUCP calls. We used our own machines as routers which saved buying Cisco gear.

It was amusing a couple years after I left Sun when I chatted with Milo Medin about how he was using OSI at NASA. Milo pointed out that GOSIP only meant that he was limited to vendors that had OSI software "available"; NASA did not need to deploy OSI nor even to buy it. It did mean that smaller vendors were generally locked out of US government customers: they could only buy from Sun or large companies like DEC or IBM. It was also amusing to hear that the Corporation for Open Systems was running PC=NFS using TCP/IP. to get their work done. Sun eventually found out that customers really did want TCP/IP on Sockets, so spent a lot of time and money putting it back in after throwing it all out. Apparently, marketing did not talk to many actual customers, but other marketing people.
Bill
   On Tuesday, May 12, 2026 at 09:25:28 AM PDT, Bob Purvy via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

You (by "you" I mean nearly all the contributors of this list) built
something that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination. Take a
victory lap. Take ten.

So now you wonder if "more attention to all the other factors" was the
answer. No, it wasn't. Then you'd have been mired in politics.

On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 10:43 PM Carl Malamud via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> 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
> >
> > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter
> > Northern California Coastal Region
> > Information & Planning Coordinator
> > American Red Cross
> > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org
> >
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