 Re: strange tcpip issue
On Aug 25, 1:20*pm, JF Mezei wrote:
> Rich Jordan wrote:
> > It was the government weaseling out of the POSIX and OSI mandates that
> > pulled the rug out from under DEC and the other folks that had
> > bothered to implement it.
>
> I am not sure "weaseling" is the correct word. TCPIP grew phenomenally
> because all of a sudden, Unix started to be taken seriously. (Sun may
> have had a lot to do with it, stealing DEC customers and moving them to
> TCPIP based Unix).
>
> I think that the US government maintained the OSI mandate long enough
> for DEC (and I think HP and IBM) to implement their stack and then
> admitted that TCPIP had become the de-facto standard that allowed
> computers from any manufacturer to talk to each other (the primary
> purpose of OSI).
>
> The governmments (this includes europe as well) had a vision of a
> neutral stack (OSI). Something commercial was developped, but meanwhile
> TCPIP came along at a much faster pace and responded to the needs of a
> neutral networking platform.
>
> You also need to look at Cisco. They came out with a gizmo called a
> "router" which allowed simple boxes to do that routing job, which made
> it possible to have simple TCPIP nodes without needing the equivalent of
> "DECnet routing". And that gave TCPIP a big push.
JF,
I'm working on memories without hardcopy here, but we had
meetings with company management and DOE suits, seminars, boxes of
documentation about the "mandatory" use of OSI, POSIX, (GOSIP???) for
any and all government contracts after a certain point.
Our company did a fair amount of research, some of the IT group
was working with DEC (and possibly Sun, we had those too) on OSI early
testing, gotchas, etc. I know there were many many man hours spent in
my group (which was not that big).
Then suddenly 'never mind' use TCPIP.
I'm not saying it was a good or bad decision overall, but it was
a suckerpunch to people who had been told in no uncertain terms 'you
will do this if you want to keep working with and selling stuff to
us'.
There's an element of 'weasel' there.
Rich
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