Re: IETF turns 30

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 16/01/2016 06:50, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
...
> Thing is that the first time I was in a meeting at which an OSI
> transition plan was discussed was July or so of 1992. And it was very
> much pre-planning since the only vendor that was pushing OSI
> networking was Digital and DECnet Phase V wasn't due for several
> years.

Funny that, since I wrote CERN's networking policy in 1985 and it was
OSI based [1][2]. And then I demolished it in 1988 [3] and 1989 [4].

However, do remember that in July 1992, OSI/CLNP was a very serious
candidate for IPng, and remained so for the next two years.

> So we were starting efforts at the very time IETF was shutting them down.

DECnet Phase IV had already run out of addresses and we needed Phase V
for that reason alone. It was indeed a dead end, but you may recall
that some of the physics experiments were so deeply committed to VAX/VMS
that they wouldn't contemplate anything other than DECnet. We did deploy
Phase V starting late 1994 [5], and we did repeatedly ask Digital to support
DECnet upper layers over TCP/IP. But we all know how that ended. Quoting
my own book "The end of that story is a sad one: we just about got the
high-energy physics DECnets converted to Phase V when it was time to switch
them off, since everyone had started using TCP/IP instead."

All the same, the history of the IETF would have been utterly different
if they had ignored OSI back in 1986.

   Brian

[1] Computer Communications at CERN, Conf. 'Computing in High Energy Physics', Amsterdam, June 1985, proceedings ed.
L.O.Hertzberger and W.Hoogland, North-Holland, 1986.
[2] CERN Data Communications Policy, CERN internal report DD/85/14, July 1985.
[3] COSINE Implementation Phase: the View from a Major Site, RARE Networkshop 1988, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 16
(1988) 121.
[4] Is OSI Too Late?, RARE Networkshop 1989, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 17 (1989) 284.
[5] Denise Heagerty, 'Running DECnet/OSI (Phase V) at CERN', CERN Computer Newsletter 217, 1994.