Steve Firth wrote:
On Tue, 1 Aug 2006 10:59:54 +0100, Andy Hall wrote:

On 2006-08-01 08:15:17 +0100, Steve Firth said:

On Tue, 1 Aug 2006 08:00:31 +0100, Andy Hall wrote:

The U.S. government DoD attempted to mandate it in the form of GOSIP
for all environments from 1990 onwards. That never happened
Um, not quite. I've been using GOSIP for the last few years and it's only
now that the network in question is to be converted to TCP/IP.
Do you mean the US or UK one?

UK. Like X25, it's one of those pups sold to government by over-eager
academics that then gets enshrined and ends up costing the taxpayer big
money because no bugger understands it and nothing can be bought off the
shelf.

Change over to TCP/IP has been a revelation to some of the old hands. "You
mean you can just buy that in a shop? You plug it in and it works? You only
paid 50 quid???"

etc.
Its the contrast between designed by committee to be perfect, never
needing to be changed, and designed by a group of engineers to work, and
subsequently refined time and again to make it work better.