Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!twg.com!david From: david@twg.com (David S. Herron) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Networking (Re: Supercomputer Experiment vs Amiga) Message-ID: <8052@gollum.twg.com> Date: 10 Oct 90 00:34:42 GMT References: <31879@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <6722@sugar.hackercorp.com> Reply-To: david@twg.com (David S. Herron) Distribution: comp Organization: The Wollongong Group, Palo Alto, CA Lines: 46 In article cimshop!davidm@uunet.UU.NET (David S. Masterson) writes: >In article <6722@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com >(Peter da Silva) writes: > > ...which is why it would not be able to run on an OSI network. No great > loss: OSI is not terribly important these days. > >But didn't DoD express interest in dropping TCP/IP in favor of OSI on the idea >that the TCP/IP protocol had gone just about as far as it could whereas the >OSI protocol would have more "extensive" features (not sure what, though)? > >I also thought, but am not sure, that the lower levels of both protocols had >the ability to interconnect. Well.. since I happen to be in the group of people developing The Wollongong Group's OSI software I suppose that means I know something about the lay of this particular stretch of the swamps. The DoD did at one time decide that "TP4" would replace "IP" at some future time. TP4 is one of the transport protocols in the ISO suite and is the one which most closely matches IP (connectionless, able to lose packets, sequenced, etc). The US Government wants to have all their networking capability moved over to the ISO suite. This is what is providing the oomph to the ISO developments in the USA. In Europe and other places, the phone companies normally tightly control all telecommunications. Part of that control is to specify that only the ISO suite be used for networking, at least for long distance networking. The lower levels of the protocols are quite different. At the lowest levels, however, most physical layers are able to accomodate many protocol families at once. Ethernet, for instance, has a "type" field in the packet header as does PPP (the replacement for SLIP). Some of the applications are able to be used with either TCP or OSI transport protocols. The mailer we sell, for instance, (WIN/MHS) can do the X.400 MHS-MHS protocols using either TCP or OSI protocol stacks. -- <- David Herron, an MMDF & WIN/MHS guy, <- Formerly: David Herron -- NonResident E-Mail Hack <- <- Remember: On System V it's "tar xovf", not "tar xvf"!