On 2006-08-01 10:52:53 +0100, "Doctor Drivel" said:


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


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.

I am not going to waste time debating that one with you. It's only
necessary to look at the series of transport TPs to realise that
connection-oriented was the original intent.




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.

That's complete nonsense as well, although arguably had they not been,
the whole thing would have come to an end a lot quicker than it did.
The large corporations have a part to play just the same as anybody else.



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.

No it wasn't. When I think back, less than 5% of organisations that
I talked to at the time had the remotest interest in using it once it
was realised that it was not going to come to fruition in less than
geological time.

At the end of the day, people have work to do and businesses to run.




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.

The whole thing with the DoD moving away from OSI began in 1990 when
they came to the realisation that they were going to go on waiting for
a very long time for products. I was involved in several RFP
responses at the time and do know what happened.



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.

It was essentially the absence of bureaucracy that is the largest
factor in that, together with technologies being adopted and adapted by
use rather than being mandated from ivory tower committees.



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.

Too little. Too late.


It was envisaged that networks would be private nets.

To a large extent, they still are.


No one really thought anyone would be so daft to use the open and
unpoliced Internet to connect up their companies. They did.

Some do in part. Most use private circuits and increasingly, VPN
services that are not run over the public internet..



All sorts of security software came out, firewalls and the likes, and
most of it was easily breached.

That would have happened regardless of the technology. Once one has a
connection to a public network (any public network) the potential
exists for security breach.


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.

Academic, because it was never going to happen.




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.

Costing a fortune to run because the expertise in them is rapidly
disappearing. It's difficult to find anyone with technical background
aged under about 35 who knows much about X.25.




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.

I don't think that the IR can be held up as a shining example of doing
anything that is competent or worthwhile.



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.

A pointless exercise.



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.

.... and the market moved faster than the outdated way of establishing
standards through ISO.



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 meant commercially it was doomed to be a failure. Outside
government circles, one would be hard pressed to come up with more than
a handful of companies who used it.



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.

Wrong. The first commercial IP WAN routers came out in the early to
mid 80s. I know, because I installed some of them.



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.

Do tell me how many major league companies have made a long term
commercial success out of selling OSI products.





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.

Do name some.