[HECnet] "IP protocols on DECnet'

[Vern Brownell]

Hi Peter.

Just a quick note regarding your comment on DEC and OSI vs. TCP.  It triggered some memories of the distant past.

I was at DEC in the early 80’s.  I started in the Tops-10 networking group, but wound up being part of the “DECnet-36” project.  I wrote about half of the DECnet stack for Tops-10 and TOPS-20. I left DEC in about 1983 when they cancelled the Jupiter.  My recollection around then was OSI was supported by the ITU, all of PTTs around the world and most, if not all, global telecom companies.  TCP/IP was seen as a mostly US-originated short term hack by most of them.  Brilliant foresight.  Most of us thought this OSI stuff was BS, but we had to play along.  We were all very familiar with TCP/IP and were big fans and used it daily.  I have a map/printout of the “ARPAnet” in 1978 and it was about 70 nodes, with about 50 nodes being DEC machines.

DEC participated along with most of the other major computer vendors in endless OSI standards committee meetings which ultimately got nowhere.  Some of them, I had the misfortune of participating in and it was like watching paint dry.  It seemed to most vendors (including DEC) up until about 1984 thought that OSI was the future.  Some on the DECnet review group (DRG) saw the future as DECnet morphing into the OSI stack.  They had some great people on the DRG, and they correctly pointed out the shortcomings with TCP/IP (limited addressing (pre-IP 6, vulnerabliliies, poor routing, etc), but history shows they made the wrong choice and those vulnerabilities were mostly fixed over time.  In those early days most other vendors had horrible proprietary networking solutions and DECnet was by fair the best.

After I left DEC, the group I managed developed both OSI and TCP stacks at Stratus Computer in the mid-80’s.  My recollection is every customer bought TCP, nobody bought OSI.  I think we sold one copy of the OSI product to GM for their “factory of the future” project (OSI/MAP I think it was called).  So much for OSI and top down planning!  Perhaps the only thing useful that came out of many years of OSI work was the framework and terminology.

Cheers,

Vern


> On Nov 8, 2021, at 9:55 AM, Peter Lothberg <roll at stupi.com> wrote:
> 
> Another protocol that might make sense is a DECnet adopted
> variant of RFC-953, where sri-nic is replaced by MIM::...
> 
> Can anyone explain why DEC decided to go down the OSI track, instead
> of putting Phase-4 services on top of ip (TCP). By the time the 
> "OSI vs IP" protocol was over in reality over?
> 
> -P
> 
> For anyone that has minutes to spare, here is Geoff Huston's talk
> at Ripe about the "history"..
> 
> http://www.lothberg.org/Video/Geoff_Huston-How_the_Internet_Changed-20140513-163958.mp4