Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!topaz.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@topaz.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans Subject: Re: OSI-model software Message-ID: <12577@topaz.rutgers.edu> Date: Wed, 10-Jun-87 21:21:03 EDT Article-I.D.: topaz.12577 Posted: Wed Jun 10 21:21:03 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 20-Jun-87 09:01:21 EDT References: <223@diab.UUCP> <233@idacrd.UUCP> <526@alliant.UUCP> <19265@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <492@houxa.UUCP> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 43 To: mel1@houxa.UUCP No, there isn't a war on. There's no real question about the facts: 1) if you want to build a large-scale network now, use TCP/IP; 2) in a few years, the ISO protocols will be widely implemented, so you may want to use them instead. Given that both the vendors and the U.S. government are committed to ISO, it is doomed to success. Cynical explanations have been considered. One of the more interesting is that you can keep your customers locked in for a few more years by saying that you are working on ISO and that is why you aren't giving them TCP/IP. And your ISO will be here Real Soon Now. However I think the real answer is that no group of people is ever happy with what another group of people did. The people doing ISO are from the European telephone monopolies, who know only X.25, and from U.S. vendors, who have spent years doing their own proprietary networks. In fact the U.S. representatives have done us a great favor, which is far too little appreciated in the TCP/IP community: they have gotten ISO to include a protocol family that is very similar in philosophy to TCP/IP. Personally I think we'd be a lot better off if they had actually used TCP/IP. But as I said, what group, when considering something another group has done, will ever just accept it? And the international politics are such that what we have may be the best we can hope for in any case. There are always things you can do better the second time, or think you can. So their equivalent of IP is sort of the same, but the bits are in different places, the documentation is written in the usual impenetrable ISOese (Reading this stuff makes me appreciate Postel's real achievements in writing readable specifications.), and there are a few more features here and there. Similarly with TP4. I'm not exactly jumping for joy. The bureacrats are convinced that ISO will save them all this money, because they can get the vendors to support it instead of having to pay all those university types to implement it the way they have done for TCP/IP. But of course that won't ever happen. The government is going to pay for ISO development too, one way of the other. No way this conversion is going to save them money. Despite the demo implementations that exist now, it will be a couple of years before it is widely available. And we'll have to deal with two kinds of networks in parallel for several years. I can think of no technical benefit that will come from the changeover. But it will happen, and we'll all live. Processor power and bandwidth is going up fast enough that any extra overhead involved in the new protocols won't sink us. In the meantime, if you don't like excitement, stick with TCP/IP for production use, but start experimenting with ISO, and make sure all the vendors you deal with for networking and communications are working on ISO.