Xref: utzoo soc.culture.british:11690 comp.protocols.tcp-ip:16563 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!athene!pcg From: pcg@aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: soc.culture.british,comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: IP in the UK (was Re: Fingering the English) Message-ID: Date: 17 Jun 91 22:44:51 GMT References: <1991Jun17.115011.17634@gdr.bath.ac.uk> Sender: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 98 In-reply-to: exspes@gdr.bath.ac.uk's message of 17 Jun 91 11:50:11 GMT On 17 Jun 91 11:50:11 GMT, exspes@gdr.bath.ac.uk (P E Smee) said: exspes> In article pcg@aber.ac.uk exspes> (Piercarlo Grandi) writes: pcg> Also, the DARPA was funding a lot of efforts to produce networking pcg> ARPAnet software for a large variety of machines, software that was, pcg> thanks to US govmt. practice, freely available. exspes> But not always outside the States -- owing to various 'technology exspes> transfer' regulations, including CoCom. [ ... even staunch expses> allies like the UK have to be wary of crazy USA export controls expses> ... ] Agreed. But this does not mean then that JNT had to choose something completely different and incompatible and build everything from the ground up. It could have meant that JNT could have taken what was on offer (a lot!) as to implementations and start from the publicly available standards to duplicate what was not. Frankly, to everybody but a PTT, the DARPA is a far more "open" body than the CCITT. For example anbybody can submit cheaply and have a quick "approval" for an RFC, if it is useful. No red tape, no colossal expenses. pcg> The JNT chose unproven, incomplete technology for which there was pcg> no ready made software, against proven, well established technology pcg> for which there was a large and growing mass of ready made pcg> software. exspes> Except, this 'large mass' of software has some serious deficiencies I would object to 'serious', it is a classic english understatement; I would say 'catastrophic'. There are not that many major sw/hw components in widespread use today which do not have *catastrophic* shortcomings. SunOS, SysV3.2, MSDOS, NFS, X11, ... choose your favourite abomination (not to mention ASN.1, X.400, the plethora of ridiculously incompatible TPs, ...). TCP/IP and company, for all their failings (my favourite one is watermark acknowledgement in TCP/IP) and limitations (no really good internetwork gateway or routing protocols) is not one of the worst, and it is lightweight and efficient, at least compared to ISO/OSI. exspes> (as compared with notional IP specs -- particularly, in terms of exspes> subnet masking. The problem with subnet masking is that it is basically a hack; it could well be a clean hack, but very few people actually understand subnetting. Too bad. exspes> It also contains many well-known security holes, [ ... ] Also, exspes> the underlying structure of addresses makes address management a exspes> royal pain. Just flies in the ointment. The comparison the JNT had before themselves was between a working viable fairly suboptimal system of specifications and implementations and an incomplete paper design, which could have been conceivably optimally designed and implemented (it wasn't...), but nobody could have been sure. *IF* ISO/OSI had been completely designed then, *IF* the design had been problem free, *IF* implementations had been freely available, then maybe it could have made sense for the UK to ignore a dozen years of ARPAnet experience and easy connectivity with the largest (and at the time the only one) research network in the world and live in splendid isolation. But all those *IF*s were not true at the time, only very prejudiced people could not see it, and are still not true now, and even if they were, that is even *IF* ISO/OSI were distinctly better than ARPAnet as to technical quality and availability, it would still make more sense to have connectivity, and live with good enough. exspes> And, in some places (e.g. here) we do not have available, for exspes> cultural reasons, the large mass of student employees which a exspes> typical US University used to handle all this drudgery. (Mind exspes> you, the ISO NSAP addresses seem to have gone overboard in the exspes> other direction. Here the culprit is not really TCP/IP, but UNIX. UNIX, which was designed assumign that Thompson & Ritchie were the system managers. TCP/IP is really a minor nuisance, and there are decent tools out there to relieve a lot of the problems. As I said we are stuck with abominable sw all around us; yet we still muddle thru. For a lot of this the UK academic environment is guilty of many sins of omission; the quality of much UK sw research has been, especially in the sixties and the seventies, much higher than that of now popular USA equivalents, but the stubborn persistence with which the UK research has been kept well "hidden" has been a disgrace. Just compare MUSS with Unix... -- Piercarlo Grandi | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@aber.ac.uk