johnwallace4@yahoo.co.uk wrote:

> OSI networking (which was the foundation for Phase V) solved loads of
> problems that the IP world has hardly noticed yet (and at least one
> which will be all too familiar with folks around the world). Like the
> VMS world vs the PC world, VMS and OSI benefit from an "architecture",
> rather than from an anarchic growth over decades.


One need not forget that OSI had been seen as the future of enterprise
networking, able to link machines from different vendors together, and
more importantly, there was demand from government and industry to
implement such a thing. Digital was a world leader in that regards.

What happened was that Digital was blindsighted by TCPIP which speeded
way ahead and everyone jumping onto the TCPIP bandwagon, while Digital
remain sort of blind to the fact that TCPIP had just made OSI irrelevant.

However, at the time DEC decided to go OSI, it was the right decision
because at that time, TCPIP had not yet become a enterprise networking
porotocol, it was still used by research/universities.

Also remember that at that time, the Internet was still a "non profit
cooperative" for non-commercial use and there were no telecom commercial
offerings for TCPIP based networks. X.25 and dedicated lines were what
was available commercially back then.

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.

"Richard B. Gilbert" writes:

> Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply wrote:

>> DEC manufactured DECnet, which was superior. Why should they have
>> pushed something inferior? Non-DEC stuff could speak DECnet as well, so
>> it wasn't clear that TCPIP would win in the end.

> DECNet Phase IV or Phase V?

TCP/IP was in development in the Phase III timeframe, and went live on the
ARPANET about the time Phase IV was announced.

--
Rich Alderson "You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime."
news@alderson.users.panix.com --Death, of the Endless

johnwallace4@yahoo.co.uk writes:

> The mail protocols SMTP and POP date back to an era of 110 baud teletypes and
> computers with 32kwords of memory.

SMTP was designed in the early 1980s. The implementation on which I worked ran
on a 2MW DEC-20.

POP was designed on the back of a napkin in a Palo Alto-area restaurant in the
late 1980s. It never saw a Teletype, having been designed with the Macintosh
and (*hxack*tpfui) Windows in mind.

--
Rich Alderson "You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime."
news@alderson.users.panix.com --Death, of the Endless

"Richard B. Gilbert" writes:

> Somehow, I can't get excited about a product that solves problems I
> didn't have when it was introduced, and which, ten or so years later, I
> still don't have. SMTP and POP may be "obsolete" but they have been
> delivering mail for the last 25 years or so and may be good for another
> ten or twenty years. DECnet Phase IV may be obsolete but it does the
> job I need done!

SMTP is a bit over 25 years old, POP just over 20.

Just keeping things straight.

--
Rich Alderson "You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime."
news@alderson.users.panix.com --Death, of the Endless

JF Mezei writes:

> 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).

[snip]

> 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.

I think you ... Scratch that, I *know* you have this backwards. cisco Systems
brought out their router, which originally used the SUN-1 processor board
designed for the Stanford University Network, before BSD was released. The
original target was the sites already running TCP/IP for ARPANET connectivity.
(Another of cisco's early products was the MEIS, a Massbus-based Ethernet
interface for the KL-10 processor designed by one of the cisco founders while
at Stanford.)

--
Rich Alderson "You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime."
news@alderson.users.panix.com --Death, of the Endless

Rich Alderson wrote:
> "Richard B. Gilbert" writes:
>
>> Somehow, I can't get excited about a product that solves problems I
>> didn't have when it was introduced, and which, ten or so years later, I
>> still don't have. SMTP and POP may be "obsolete" but they have been
>> delivering mail for the last 25 years or so and may be good for another
>> ten or twenty years. DECnet Phase IV may be obsolete but it does the
>> job I need done!
>
> SMTP is a bit over 25 years old, POP just over 20.
>
> Just keeping things straight.
>

Make that about 26 years old for SMTP. RFC 821 is dated August 1982!

On Aug 25, 9:31 pm, "Richard B. Gilbert"
wrote:
> Rich Alderson wrote:
> > "Richard B. Gilbert" writes:
>
> >> Somehow, I can't get excited about a product that solves problems I
> >> didn't have when it was introduced, and which, ten or so years later, I
> >> still don't have. SMTP and POP may be "obsolete" but they have been
> >> delivering mail for the last 25 years or so and may be good for another
> >> ten or twenty years. DECnet Phase IV may be obsolete but it does the
> >> job I need done!
>
> > SMTP is a bit over 25 years old, POP just over 20.
>
> > Just keeping things straight.
>
> Make that about 26 years old for SMTP. RFC 821 is dated August 1982!

And in 1982 my then employers still had RSX (32kw address space) as
did many other companies. They may well have had a few VT100s by that
time, but when VT200s were introduced in 1983 they optionally had 20mA
current loop, as Teletype interface compatibility still wasn't that
unusual a requirement. OK I was a few years off with POP (sorry, it
was a while ago).

Dedicated routers weren't just a Cisco concept, though I can't quickly
find any references to the ancient DEC routers which lived in the
first DEC office I visited (which was indeed in the days of X.25 and
dedicated DDCMP lines). Host-based routing in the world of DECnet and
OSI has been (is?) a bit of a passing phase, whether the router of the
day is one of the originals whose name I forget, which filled a few
feet high of 19" rack next to the Gandalf terminal switch, or one a
little bit more recent which takes up two inches width on a DEChub 90
backplane next to the Gandalf-replacement DECserver 90.

These days lots of homes have their own IP router, some of them are
made by Linksys/Cisco, but I'm still not sure what the connection
between the enterprise market and the high volume/low margin market
is. Do IBM think they need a "low cost" (ie low margin) product for
any of their markets, or have they explicitly departed from the "low
margin" market (hello Lenovo) and stuck to what they think they're
traditionally good at (high value high margin, just like Cisco
Classic)? (Incidentally, wasn't getting rid of IBM SNA one of the real
drivers behind OSI?)

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

On Aug 25, 10:44 pm, Rich Jordan wrote:
> 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

GOSIP = Government OSI Profile. There were different OSI "profiles"
depending on required application environment. For example, a desktop
environment might follow the TOP (aka Technical and Office) one, and
manufacturing automation networks might follow the MAP one. There
would be conformance tests to ensure that anything claiming
conformance was actually vaguely capable of doing the job, and maybe
there'd even be interoperability tests too, just to make sure that end
users and vendors understood that conformance .ne. interoperability.

As you point out, big vendors of the time such as DEC, IBM, and Sun
(and/or systems houses on those platforms) did put a fair amount of
effort in to supporting this stuff by the mid 1980s, together with
players in specific fields (for example, in the automation sector,
Modicon and Siemens and GE Fanuc and others). There was one big name
in the computer world who weren't (afaik) playing along, but back in
those days their volume OS was still stuck in the 8086 era with a 640K
address space (maybe more so long as you didn't mind jumping through
various hoops) and didn't really do networking except as an
afterthought; it would be 1993 before they had the first release of a
proper 32bit OS with something resembling proper networking, and
another few more years again before NT caught on in volume. NT was
originally going to be POSIX compliant but iirc eventually they got
"grandfathered" out of the POSIX requirement somehow, and the OSI
requirement probably went the same convenient way.

Such is the way that IT history is made (and is repeated, just look at
the current situation with open document formats...).

In article , Rich Alderson writes:
>"Richard B. Gilbert" writes:
>
>> Somehow, I can't get excited about a product that solves problems I
>> didn't have when it was introduced, and which, ten or so years later, I
>> still don't have. SMTP and POP may be "obsolete" but they have been
>> delivering mail for the last 25 years or so and may be good for another
>> ten or twenty years. DECnet Phase IV may be obsolete but it does the
>> job I need done!
>
>SMTP is a bit over 25 years old, POP just over 20.
>
>Just keeping things straight.
>

SMTP - RFC 821 August 1982 see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc918

Though this grew out of earlier mail protocols developed during the 1970s
and 1980's eg

Mailbox protocol - RFC 196 - July 1971
FTP mail - RFC 458 - Feb 1973
Mail protocol - RFC 524 - June 1973
Mail Transfer Protocol - RFC 780 - May 1981


POP - RFC 918 October 1984 see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc918

Just keeping things straight.


David Webb
Security team leader
CCSS
Middlesex University


>--
>Rich Alderson "You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime."
>news@alderson.users.panix.com --Death, of the Endless

Tim Wilkinson wrote:
> OK please be gentle, it must be 15 years since I last touched a vax./vms
>
> So VMS 7.3 installed and working on a subnetted network. (tcp on a vax. new
> to me, it was all decnet and lat in my day).
>
>
> So. my company use the RFC1918 scheme globally the UK has 10.32.0.0/12
> assigned to it. When we get to my home I have a wonderfully generous /28
> subnet mask applied.
>
> so whilst my dhcp router dishes out address with a netmask of
> 255.255.255.240 which is picked up by my PC/linux boxes etc. I issue the
> command on my vms system
>
>
> TCPIP> ifconfig -a
> LO0: flags=100c89
> inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000 ipmtu 4096
>
> QE0: flags=c63
> inet 10.34.220.88 netmask ff000000 broadcast 10.255.255.255 ipmtu 1500
>
> QE1: flags=c43
> inet 192.168.17.125 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.17.255 ipmtu
> 1500
>
> TN0: flags=80
>
> so interface QE0 which is assigned using dhcp is picking up the correct ip
> address, but ignores the subnet mask and assigns the wrong mask of
> ff000000, and incorrect broadcast address.
>
> my pc etc on the same network gives me
> Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:
>
> Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : netgear.com
> IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.34.220.89
> Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.240
> Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 10.34.220.81
> So I know my router/dhcp configs are right.
>
> I had seen similar in old systems years ago, where ip stacks did not
> properly support subnet masking. But I would have thought DEC would have got
> this right.
>
> Advice please guys how do I fix this
>
>

Or you could hard-code your IP address/subnet info... and not worry
about it...