[TUHS] ISO, OSI, and DECnet (was Re: If not Linux, then what?)

[Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>]

On 8/28/19, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 2:46 AM Peter Jeremy <peter@rulingia.com> wrote:
>
> Tru64 talked to DECnet Phase X (I don't remember which one, maybe 4 or 5),
> which had become an ISO/OSI stack by that point for political reasons
> inside of Digital (the OSI vs TCP war reminded me of the Pascal vs C and
> VMS vs UNIX wars - all very silly in retrospect, but I guess it was really
> about who got which $s for development).

It was DECnet Phase V that was based on the ISO/OSI stack.  IIRC, at
the time the European telcos were pushing OSI, it had become an ISO
standard, etc. etc.  It was also pretty easy to compatibly slide the
legacy proprietary DECnet Phase IV adaptive routing and virtual
circuit layers into the OSI stack.

TCP won the war, of course.  The risk with international standards
fashioned out of whole cloth by a committee (as opposed to being a
regularization of existing practice) is that the marketplace may
choose to ignore the "standard".  OSI and the Ada programming language
are cases in point.

-Paul W.