On 2006-08-01 13:48:33 +0100, "Doctor Drivel" said:


"Andy Hall" wrote in message ...
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.

In a conversation like this with you, there is nothing *to* lose



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.

That depends on who you mean by the "top guys". Either way, it is
unlikely that you would have come into contact with any of them.




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.

Perhaps you would like to drop John Chambers an email and see if he
shares your view.




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.

Doing what?



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.

In some way. Unfortunately for the vendors, few people were buying
which is why there is little left in that arena.



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.

Don't be silly.

You don't have the feintest clue of what you are talking about. It
doesn't come from reading books and surfing the web, I'm afraid.




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.

... and your point is?




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.

You're surfing well. Care to mention the major technologies used for
doing this and their specific security vulnerabilities?



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.

You don't say. I never knew that before.



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?

or to go round in circles like you seem to be doing......




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.

Not really. There is no value. Who cares?



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.

That was one of the promises. There were way too many variants and
options for it to have ever stood a chance of wide adoption.

The market moved fast not because TCP/IP was good, it isn't.

I don't think anybody has said it is.

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.

Possibly not. However, for the moment TCP/IP is as open as it gets.
It doesn't need a big bureaucracy to achieve that.




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.

Oh no they couldn't. Some were nowhere near powerful enough

Companies were producing OSI stacks to work on any machine or OS.

Didn't get them far though did it?

The EU/NIST were funding testing tools to be produced to test OSI
implementations to aid the companies developing products.

If the EU was funding it then one knows it has no commercial viability.


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.

Rubbish.


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.

Answer the question


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.

No they didn't. OSI would have mae life horrendous, allowing for all
sorts of vendor lockins.



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.

TCP/IP is an open and free protocol set. Anybody can read the spec and
implement it.



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.

There was no spanner, and this was not the sequence of events.


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.

and ??