"Andy Hall" wrote in message
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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.

Matt, very wise as you have lost.

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,

Matt, not at all.

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.

Matt, it was. Not in your backwards company it probably 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

Most don't understand networks or protocols anyway. Speak to the top guys
and their knowledge is limited.

once it was realised that it was not going to come to fruition in less
than geological time.

Matt, it was already there with many using it, although not in you backward
company.

After the Internet took off like a rocket.

The whole thing with the DoD moving away from OSI began in 1990

Strange that I was working withj US government agencies in 1991 and the aim
was OSI. Matt, you must stop making things up.

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.

OSI was for sale. Wanted a Windows PC OSI stack? They were there.

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.

As I said, they never anticipated the meteoric rise of the Internet. If they
did they would have insisted it be on OSI in the late 1980s. The Internet
was a curio used by geeks in unis and by fellas with bears and mussies. The
odd commercial organisation knobbed on the Internet and found it a useful
comms tool to gain know-how in research matters from unis.

The industry was full of ignorance of OSI too. Most didn't care as long as
something worked not looking to the future just fire fighting most of the
time, having team of people just keep keeping a system up with bits of
string. Every time they updated it costed a fortune, whereas with an open
system it would have been easy. They just didn't know. Ignorance and
negative propaganda by the likes of IBM, etc, didn't help either. Your
ignorance of OSI is typical.

It was envisaged that networks would be private nets.

To a large extent, they still are.

They are? Look at how many small companies use the Internet to communicate
to their offices and outside.

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..

VPNs over the Internet is very popular. It give them the impression it is
their own private network, but it is on an open public network that an smart
hacker can get into.

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.

Many private networks have only one point into the public work which can be
easily policed and shored up.

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.

Matt, you missed the point...again.

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.

There is still a hell of a lot of it around. It works and does what they
want. Why spend a fortune to stand still?

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.

They had one of the most advanced network and computer systems in the world.
Private companies would come and look at what they had done. Most was
modular. Many functions that are now off the shelf they pioneered and had
it bespoke written. The software on the PCs could be updated, including the
OS from one central point in the country overnight. Propagated out to the
servers. When the users logged on it took half and hour to update the lot
onto each PC and all ready to go. 1000s of them all at once. All by one
system admin man with a beard or mussie. They pioneered network computers,
diskless machines that stored nothing. Bill Gates tried to bring one out
saying he had invented it. A bootstrap pulled in the OS and user profile
and ran it from RAM. Users only saved on a server disk. Later a user could
be down country and get his own profile from his own server too. All
seemless to the user who though it was like a normal PC at home. The
government spent a lot of money ensuring that it got its money and reduced
maintenance costs of the system drastically. When the system was framed out
to EDS, the Yanks were quite amazed at what they saw, thinking only the
Yanks had advanced systems.

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.

Matt, what a stupid comment.

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 the standard.

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

OSI was advanced, open system plug and play. The market moved fast not
because TCP/IP was good, it isn't. It was because one element, the Internet
used it. Nothing else.

An open system is still be talked about, as TCP/IP will not stay forever. It
should have sent 15 years ago.

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.

It wasn't doomed to be a failure at all, it projected to take off. All
routers could handle OSI. Companies were producing OSI stacks to work on
any machine or OS. The EU/NIST were funding testing tools to be produced to
test OSI implementations to aid the companies developing products. The
Japanese were buying into it big time too.

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

Once the government agencies used it and a handful of large companies, and
it was to "official", then it would have zoomed ahead. The WWW pushed it
into the background.

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.

Few used TCP/IP on WANs. TCP/IP was regarded as an Ethernet protocol.
Ironically the Internets backbone was mainly on X.25 with TCP/IP running
over.

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.

Missed the point again Matt. OSI was gaining ground not in a competition
because it was to be the open system standard. The WWW using TCP/IP killed
it.

The big looser was the end user especially the smaller companies. Many have
spent fortunes on network and mismatched computer crap. OSI on the network
side would have made life very much easier and cheaper for them. Only big
rip-off companies gain by the current setup.

The companies against OSI had a vested interst in TCP/IP and would all thye
could to stop this opne a free protocval being implemented.

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.

I mentioned one large German car company who were looking ahead...as the
Germans do. They liked the concept and what they saw. No one expected the
WWW to throw a spanner in the works. Oh and a number of large Japanese
companies, I recall a number of large Japanese companies were heavily into
OSI too. The Japs were very keen on the idea.