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From: grahamt@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Graham S Thomas)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british,comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: IP in the UK (was Re: Fingering the English)
Message-ID: <5280@syma.sussex.ac.uk>
Date: 5 Jun 91 13:39:32 GMT
References: <7957@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Organization: SPRU, Univ. of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Lines: 35

From article <7957@ecs.soton.ac.uk>, by tjc@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Tim Chown):
> 
> Here at Southampton our Electronics and Computer Science departmental 
> connections are all TCP/IP; we have 200+ nodes on our local network.
> Now we're just about to have our campus network go live, and yes, it all
> runs by Pink Book.  Our Computing Services who will adminster this beauty
> have had it imposed on them from above by some national committee.  Yum.
> Somewhere someone needs their head removing from their a**e !!!

When the Coloured Book software suite was conceived, it was (according
to my best information - correct me if I'm wrong) by no means clear that
TCP/IP would become as dominant as it has today.  In any case, the
Coloured Books were always seen as ultimately giving way to full OSI
protocols.  Again, the originators could not have forseen that OSI would
be such a long time a-comin', or that it could conceivably be threatened
by semi-open protocols like TCP/IP.

Admittedly, it might have taken a little too long for the JANET
management to face up to commercial realities (i.e. TCP/IP comes cheaper
and quicker for new machines) and user desires (the rest of the world -
exaggerating a bit - uses it, so why can't we?).  But early this year
the decision was taken to offer TCP/IP over JANET as a supplementary
protocol.  My impression at this April's JANET Networkshop was that
there is a lot of effort being put into its implementation, and there
are a lot of potential users keen to see that this effort doesn't flag.

So, hang on in there until (maybe) the beginning of '92.  Already, you can
transfer files to & from the Internet using uk.ac.ft-relay, and it's
possible to get an account on uk.ac.nsfnet-relay from which you can
telnet across the world.  So it's not all doom and gloom!

Graham
-- 
Graham Thomas, SPRU, Mantell Building, U of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RF, UK
Email: grahamt@syma.sussex.ac.uk   Phone: +44 273 678165   Fax: .. 685865