In 1990, the federal government released a new version of GOSIP, which required that vendors demonstrate compliance with the OSI suite of protocols. These would really have been the "public internet" with standards agreed upon by international bodies, and voting by country. The large telephone companies, in many countries government-regulated monopolies, expected to run it, as they did telephone service.
I actually kicked off a lengthy thread on the internet-history mailing list about this, and the conclusion was that by 1990, the war was already over and TCP had won.
Network operators said, in effect, "OK, we support OSI. But GOSIP doesn't say we actually have to run it on our network."
One guy from The Wollongong Group said that his company offered a package to assist in converting from TCP to OSI, since obviously everyone would have to do it. They found that in Europe, supposedly the hotbed of international standards, there was only demand for a package to convert the other way: OSI --> TCP.
Note that this is not an object lesson proving either that "government works" OR "government always screws things up."
The reason TCP worked and OSI didn't was that regular engineers and grad students and postdocs, not politicians and big telecoms, built it. One reason they had such success is that the Defense Department applied time pressure: "give us something that works now, not in the glorious future." So that's also the government -- just a different part of it.
The weird side effect of all this is that almost all networking classes and books explain TCP using ... the OSI [OSI] model, even though it doesn't really apply and can itself be confusing trying to make everything fit [1122].
I actually kicked off a lengthy thread on the internet-history mailing list about this, and the conclusion was that by 1990, the war was already over and TCP had won.
Network operators said, in effect, "OK, we support OSI. But GOSIP doesn't say we actually have to run it on our network."
One guy from The Wollongong Group said that his company offered a package to assist in converting from TCP to OSI, since obviously everyone would have to do it. They found that in Europe, supposedly the hotbed of international standards, there was only demand for a package to convert the other way: OSI --> TCP.
Note that this is not an object lesson proving either that "government works" OR "government always screws things up."
The reason TCP worked and OSI didn't was that regular engineers and grad students and postdocs, not politicians and big telecoms, built it. One reason they had such success is that the Defense Department applied time pressure: "give us something that works now, not in the glorious future." So that's also the government -- just a different part of it.