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From: keith@excelan.COM (Keith Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Vote for/against "comp.protocols.iso.migration"
Message-ID: <1405@excelan.COM>
Date: 15 Jun 90 02:26:02 GMT
References: <4488@infmx.UUCP> <8689@goofy.Apple.COM>
Sender: news@excelan.COM
Reply-To: keith@ca.excelan.com (Keith Brown)
Organization: Excelan, A Novell Co., San Jose, CA.
Lines: 44


|TCP/IP is NOT popular in Europe.  It doesn't surprise me that its not popular
|in Korea either.  The big reason here is that the PTTs that implement and
|use the networks in Europe are connection oriented.  They wand Virtual
|Circuits.  TCP/IP is a datagram network and is not acceptable.

***Rubbish!***

This is a subject I feel qualified to talk about. I'm English and spent the
last 5 years working for Excelan (the bulk of who's revenue was derived from the
sale of TCP products) providing support and consulting to our customers
all over Europe. If TCP wasn't popular then somebody was playing a very
cruel trick on me giving me so much work to do every day!

Yes the majority of European WAN's are X.25. That's the service that most of
the PTT's offer to their customers. However, you don't have to be
Gypsy Rose Lee to see that numerous commercial and university sites
are using the X.25 service to carry IP packets between remote locations.
In fact, IP routers that operate across X.25 were becoming very popular
when I left.

The work on ISO is a noble effort. However, speaking as network user
who can today, from the single screen and keyboard on my desk, log in to
all the systems that I need to, get transparent access to the same set
of files from almost all of them, non-transparent access from those
that I can't, shunt files from coast to coast at perfectly acceptable
transfer rates *and* send mail to all my colleagues and friends (even
the ones in the UK), I'm left scratching my head as to what powerful new
goodies the ISO folks are going to bestow upon me. Anybody know?

I'll consider migrating/transitioning/whatever my desktop machine the day
I look over someones shoulder and see him/her doing something useful with
ISO protocols that I can't...

Anyway, this will probably be my last posting on the subject as there
are a few engineers not a million miles from where I'm sitting who'll
probably read this and lynch me in the car park....

These are my humble opinions, not Novell's.
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Keith Brown                                      Phone: (408) 473 8308
Novell San Jose Development Centre               Fax:   (408) 433 0775
San Jose, California 95131                       Net:   keith@novell.COM
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