Xref: utzoo soc.culture.british:11719 comp.protocols.tcp-ip:16597 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!lll-winken!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!adam From: adam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Adam Hamilton) Newsgroups: soc.culture.british,comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: IP in the UK (was Re: Fingering the English) Message-ID: <11134@castle.ed.ac.uk> Date: 18 Jun 91 08:40:31 GMT References: <1991Jun17.115011.17634@gdr.bath.ac.uk> Organization: Edinburgh University Lines: 42 In article pcg@aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes: : 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. : : The JNT chose unproven, incomplete technology for which there was : no ready made software, against proven, well established technology : for which there was a large and growing mass of ready made : software. : : 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. Most of this is simply wrong. The choice made by the JNT was NOT between OSI-on-paper and a basically-working-TCP-IP. It was between TCP-IP-on-paper and a basically-working-X25, the only standardised available protocol of the time. The decision to target on OSI when available is hardly one to be criticised; after all, the Internet has stated it will convert eventually. PCG seems to have the timescales all wrong. As has been explained to him several times, the Arpanet was NOT running well-proven software at the time, it did NOT have a dozen years of experience and it did NOT have a "working viable...system of specifications and implementations". The key point he misses is that what makes sense is to run the same protocols locally as you will have to connect to if you want to go further afield. In Europe at that time that meant X25. Next message, he will start to tell us again about how the JNT chose big-endian domain ordering when little-endian had already been chosen for TCP/IP (and for viewers who have missed this endless discussion - they didn't. They simply failed to change their minds some months later when the opposite decision was made over the pond).