6 Feb
2019
6 Feb
'19
7:22 p.m.
On 2/6/19, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
That's my recollection as well. The OSI effort was dominated by the
European telcos, nearly all of which were government-run monopolies.
They were as much (if not more) interested in protecting their own
turf as in developing the next step in networking. A lot of the
complexity came from the desire to be everything to everybody. As is
often the case, the result was being nothing to nobody.
Phase V of DEC's networking product (DECnet) supported X.25 as an
alternative to DEC's proprietary transport/routing layer. I had to
install this on one of our VAXen so we could test DECmail, our
forthcoming X.400 product. I remember X.25 being excessively
complicated and a bear to set up compared to Phase IV DECnet (the
proprietary protocol stack).
-Paul W.
On Wed, Feb
06, 2019 at 10:16:24AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
In many ways, it was a classic second system
effect because they were
trying to fix everything they thought was wrong with TCP/IP at the time
I'm not sure this part is accurate: the two efforts were contemporaneous; and
my impression was they were trying to design the next step in networking, based
on _their own_ analysis of what was needed.