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From: barns@GATEWAY.MITRE.ORG
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: When will DDN switch to GOSIP?
Message-ID: <9106061402.AA02322@gateway.mitre.org>
Date: 6 Jun 91 14:01:29 GMT
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There is a document "Army Open Systems Interconnection (OSI)
Interoperability and Transition Plan" that you should probably
try to get through Army channels.  I imagine it came from
USAISC at Ft Huachuca.  The people who did this would also have
access to various other DOD OSI transition information.

As for the DDN I would just briefly (and unofficially, but I
think accurately) state that the capability to support connectivity
through the PSN backbone between OSI systems has existed for some
time already.  There is really nothing to "switch" about the PSN
backbone, though some enhancements might be done for performance
reasons or to add features, should that seem to be necessary (this
is an open topic now), and appendages such as mailbridges, NIC, etc.,
do have to have OSI capabilities added eventually in order to make those
functions accessible to OSI users.

If you have boxes with GOSIP-compliant protocol stacks that include
X.25, you can connect them to the PSNs now, configure them to know
about each other and proceed to talk OSI between them.  The port
must have Basic service enabled (either basic only or basic+standard,
whatever you require).  The lack of GOSIP routing protocols has some
effects on what you can do (or more precisely, on how you can make
it happen and whether you will be glad you did) but the only real
functional limitation that comes to mind is that you can't talk pure
OSI to the non-DOD part of the Internet at the moment.

Bill Barns / MITRE-Washington / barns@gateway.mitre.org