"Andy Hall" wrote in message
...
On 2006-08-01 00:44:49 +0100, "Doctor Drivel" said:


"Andy Hall" wrote in message
...
On 2006-07-31 23:16:12 +0100, "Doctor Drivel" said:

"Andy Hall" wrote in message
...

Matt...no...... Conectionless was one of the key points.

Once they realised how dreadfully slow connection oriented was and that
it was unnecessary anyway.

Matt, no. It was in the original concept.

Wrong.

Matt, again....It was in the original concept.

Nope. The IBMers slowed everything down nit-picking a small point in a
layer for ever more. They deliberately were dragging their feet.

Nit picking is the inevitable outcome of committees, government
involvement and attempts at international standardisation. The
procedures are inevitably lengthy. It is not reasonable to lay that at
the door of IBM or any other individual participant.

It was obvious what they were up to. The big corporations should have not
been on the committees as it was clear they had another agenda.

The market moved on and left them behind.

The market was way behind. Only the Internet and www took off like a
rocket, mainly the www. That sealed it as there was too much of the
TCP/IP crap around.

Uncle Sam was going OSI.

Not for very long.

After the www skyrocketed, Sam dropped it.

Not quite. The main reason was that the OSI protocol suite was going to
be "two years away" since about 1986.

It was. It was widly adopted in the late 1980s.

Realistically that was never going to work in any useful way

Matt you are botty talking.

and so attempts were made to incorporate TCP/IP features into OSI

That was there from the start as transitional feature to upgrade large nets.

Finally, NIST suggested that the DoD drop the "OSI only" requirement in
1994.

After the Internet took off like a rocket.

Essentially, this was a political fudge that saved red faces among those
that had embarked on the OSI bandwagon, allowing them to change position.

It wasn't at all. It was a realisation that the Internet had rocketed away
leaving the rest behind and that inferior TCP/IP has become a defacto
standard by more luck than anything.

WWW substantial growth was from 1993 onwards, and may have been one
contributor to the demise of OSI in US government use, but it is clear
that the main reason was the continuing delays and lack of deliverability
of anything from the OSI committees.

It was delivered and working and was being amended as time went on by useful
feedback.

It was envisaged that networks would be private nets. No one really thought
anyone would be so daft to use the open and unpoliced Internet to connect up
their companies. They did. All sorts of security software came out,
firewalls and the likes, and most of it was easily breached. They used the
Internet because it was there and cheap.

If the Internet had been run on OSI soon enough it would be the standard
today. Seamless plug and play.

Rubbish. There is very little X.25 left in corporate networks any
longer.

You will be surprised. Lots still in government circles around the world.

No it wouldn't. IP based networks were well established before Mr
Berners-Lee came along.

You are slow. They were to be replaced by OSI in major organisations and
makers would push OSI too, then private users would adopt OSI as they
went along, but www/Internet used TCP/IP.

This was all completely theoretical because of lack of performance and
deliverability.

It worked well. Many used it on LANs as well. The IR did, although running
TCP/IP over OSI.

Companies like REtix had off the shelf OSI stacks for ethernet, token
ring, token bus, for UNIX boxes and PCs runing Windows too (well DOS then
was doing the work).

All of which is irrelevant because it never went anywhere.

Didn't it? I recall looking a Windows desktop machines running OSI, 1000s of
them, on WANs and LANs.

OSI wasn't implemented fast enough because the Internet wasn't regarded
as that important at the time. The www made it important. Before that it
was for nerds and fellas with beards and mussies.

OSI wasn't implemented fast enough because of the standardisation approach
that was taken.

Whatever that means. Er, er, it was be teh standard.

Realistically, it was doomed to failure from the outset.

It wasn't. It was a success and even BMW implemeted OSI all over the world.

I can remember making that prediction in about 1988 or 89 when there were
a few government tenders around looking for GOSIP implementation.
TCP/IP adoption was already well underway in the commercial world from
about 1986 onwards.

Only in LANs running Ethernet which were mainly all in one building. The
next round of updates to the building could have OSI all through.

One could argue that WWW growth was a significant factor later on, but I
can't think of anybody seriously intending to implement OSI from about
1988 onwards.

They were and many did. You may have been working for a company with its
head up its bum, but others were more aware of the big picture and OSI (open
system) made sense and still does.

The death knell had sounded long before 1993 for OSI in terms of an
alternative to TCP/IP.

Nonsense. I recall many companies when updating would implement OSI and have
TCP/IP over it in preparation when for the next stage of updates. Many ran
OSI on their own backbone and TCP/IP on the smaller LANs.