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From: minshall@OPAL.BERKELEY.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: ... Transmission of IP Datagrams over IEEE 802 ...
Message-ID: <8710210434.AA17243@opal.berkeley.edu>
Date: Wed, 21-Oct-87 00:34:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: opal.8710210434.AA17243
Posted: Wed Oct 21 00:34:19 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 23-Oct-87 01:55:22 EDT
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Organization: The ARPA Internet
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In a recent posting I asked an essentially political question about
the status of source routing within the IEEE 802 committees.

Today I checked with someone who has been attending some of the 802
meetings.  She directed me to Daniel Pitt, of IBM Raleigh (dreaded
home of SNA) as being a good contact on the 802.5 committee.  I then
spoke with Daniel Pitt.

From what my two informants of today said, the situation appears to be
that the 802 committee decided that the 802.5 committee (which was the
only one which had come forward with the source routing proposal) could
do whatever it wanted in terms of bridges, AS LONG AS their "product"
(ie: end result) would inter-operate with the "internetworking"
standardized on by the 802.1 committee (see below).

In addition, the 802.1 committee was charged with coming up with a proposal
for "internetworking", with the proviso that the 802.1 proposal had to
be "shown" to work with all the MAC-types (ie: 802.3, 802.4, 802.5).

At this point, 802.5 and 802.1 are going ahead with their separate
but not antithetical proposals (and each proposal is, apparently,
in the "bits and bytes" stage).

Daniel Pitt, though understandably unwilling to predict the future
success of any proposed standard, mentioned that the current 802.5
work looks like source routing as documented by IBM in the "Token-Ring
Network Architecture Reference" book.

Greg Minshall

ps  -  802.1 is a group which is supposed to tie together the work of
the 802.2 committee (which is mostly a Data Link Layer-entity) and the
three MAC committees (802.3,4,5, the physical layer).  802.1 is also
supposed to explain how the 802 family fits into the ISO OSIRM, how
network management works, and how "internetworking" happens.