5 ms·

This is a fantastic writeup. this quote really struck me and seems very apt to today: 'Glushkov’s story is also a stirring reminder to the investor classes and

This is a fantastic writeup. this quote really struck me and seems very apt to today: 'Glushkov’s story is also a stirring reminder to the investor classes and other agents of technological change that astonishing genius, far-seeing foresight and political acumen are not enough to change the world. Supporting institutions often make all the difference. '

neolefty 10y ago
And: "There is an irony to this. The first global computer networks took root in the US thanks to well-regulated state funding and collaborative research environments, while the contemporary (and notably independent) national network efforts in the USSR floundered due to unregulated competition and institutional infighting among Soviet administrators. The first global computer network emerged thanks to capitalists behaving like cooperative socialists, not socialists behaving like competitive capitalists."
- simonh 10y ago
  Yet mobile networks flourished in heavily regulated Europe, largely due to enforced standardization, years before they became ubiquitous in the USA. I worked in the Mobile industry in the late 90s. I remember being on a bus in Madrid airport taking us to our plane. Some young Spaniards were talking loudly on their mobiles while the two American tourists sitting near me gaped at them. One turned to the other and said 'Those things are everywhere. They use them all the time.' It was probably just a brief period of time, but I found it striking.
  - berntb 10y ago
    Look up the OSI standards. They were a horror to implement and use. The telecom companies wanted those to be used instead of the US tcp/ip stack. They would have had much more control and could have been fat cats, taking a large piece of the slice. Be damn happy they failed. :-) A heterogeneous world is an advantage, it gets harder for oligopolies to charge at every gate.
    - raattgift 10y ago
      There was a substantial overlap between the then Internet Activities Board and the committees associated with ISO/IEC 7498, and it was far from dominated by telecomms companies at the time. Indeed, Lyman Chapin of BBN was in ca. 1992 the chair of both! Other overlappers included Christian Huitema and IIRC Dave Katz. The OSI reference model itself originated with Charles Bachman (Honeywell, then IBM). So far, no telecomms companies to be seen. Telecomms companies and agencies were more interested in EDI in the form of X.400(84) and to some extent X.500 directory services, rather than in the lower layers, and while they were heavily invested in X.25, they were not the biggest pushers for the connection-oriented lower layers -- there were plenty of private X.25 networks operated by government agencies (including many non-PTT ones; bear in mind that the CCITT of the time was national governments represented by their local postal-telegraph-and-telecommunications ministries; the U.S. and Canada were huge outliers in having privately owned commercial telcos). There were also research & education networks with X.25 underneath, including CSNET (largely based in the USA) which was definitely part of the TCP/IP-speaking Internet. OSI's problems weren't in the people involved or in the (admittedly heavy) formalisms that go into ISO/IEC/CCITT/ITU standards, but rather that the idea was to redo TCP/IP "right", and that included supporting difficult to reconcile goals, like supporting both connection-less and connection-oriented protocols in most of the lowest of the 7 layers, and then mechanisms to provide interoperability between CO-only and CL-only talkers. At the time, well before FPGAs and ASICs were accelerating routers, and when megabytes of RAM were expensive (and slow), OSI appeared too heavyweight compared to TCP/IP, and that is one of many reasons TCP/IP won. OSI reference implementations were expensive rather than free as in beer (sort-of); compiling up your OSI elements took considerably longer; an OSI-equipped kernel was fat (too fat if it was only really talking ES-IS and nothing else); and so forth. SMTP/TCP/IP was what members of the OSI subcommittees were using to communicate with one another, in spite of the existence of EAN for X.400 and some native OSI CLNP (AlterNet, UUNET's internetwork, in the very early 1990s carried real CLNP traffic between RAND and several other organizations). Internet protocols did benefit from the OSI development work; good ideas from IDRP found their way into BGP4; IS-IS is still the IGP of choice for some large IP networks; LDAP, SNMP and others absorbed good ideas from X.500 and EFTAM; and of course DSL and OTN systems have a lot of OSI in their DNA. Finally, the U.S. government's GOSIP and similar programmes for mandatory adoption of OSI networking elsewhere probably doomed OSI networking much more than politics (and personality conflicts) among people involved in actually making the standards in the various bodies, both international (and national) and in the IETF and its close relatives. Taking profile "short cuts" to roll out OSI networking rapidly in that way raised the real possibility of fully conforming OSI networks (and stacks) that would nevertheless be mutually incompatible! Unfortunately many of the lessons learned in the failure of OSI networking were not applied in the process of choosing and standardizing a successor protocol for IP, and here we are a couple decades later with IPv6 being a compromise specification designed for speed of roll out... (In fact some of the wrong lessons learned in the very early 1990s of OSI networking are in IPv6 today: the expectation that being CPU constrained, routers must deal with relatively short, fixed-length, fixed-format fields (rather than, say, something self-describing) is front-and-centre in IPv6 addressing and headers generally. Concerns about overheads are also well-reflected in IPv6, and for terrestrial applications, those concerns were obsoleted by the turn of the century.) "A hetereogeneous world is an advantage". Well, try explaining that on the IETF mailing list as a reason to support concurrent development of a successor protocol to IPv6.
  - retro64 10y ago
    I'm not sure what to make of this comment. Are you implying the US didn't have cell phones in the late 90's? Even I had a cell phone, and still have my original (looks the one midway down on this page (http://www.mobilephonehistory.co.uk/motorola/motorola_list.php http://www.mobilephonehistory.co.uk/motorola/motorola_list.p...) - a Motorola flip (MicroTAC)). Notice the timelines as well. These were analog networks at first, but mobile was very popular here in the 90's.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      No, he is talking about GSM being a pan-european standard made companies and carriers compete on features and services rather than lock-in. Especially as GSM enforced the use of SIM cards that made it easy to move phones between carrier, or buy a phone outside of carrier offerings. Observe in contrast how Verizon is massive in USA thanks to being one of two (Sprint being the other) CDMA carrier. I keep seeing Americans lament that they want to pick up some new phone, but can't because they are grandfathered into some Verizon contract or other.
- badmadrad 10y ago
  "Socialist-like" policies usually work when they have militaristic end goals. The reason is that the govt is actually incentivized to maintain its power and protect it citizenry. Most even right leaning people would agree that government spending in this case actually makes sense because the government is directly acting in its own interests much like a private company does.

neolefty 10y ago

And: "There is an irony to this. The first global computer networks took root in the US thanks to well-regulated state funding and collaborative research environments, while the contemporary (and notably independent) national network efforts in the USSR floundered due to unregulated competition and institutional infighting among Soviet administrators. The first global computer network emerged thanks to capitalists behaving like cooperative socialists, not socialists behaving like competitive capitalists."

simonh 10y ago
Yet mobile networks flourished in heavily regulated Europe, largely due to enforced standardization, years before they became ubiquitous in the USA. I worked in the Mobile industry in the late 90s. I remember being on a bus in Madrid airport taking us to our plane. Some young Spaniards were talking loudly on their mobiles while the two American tourists sitting near me gaped at them. One turned to the other and said 'Those things are everywhere. They use them all the time.' It was probably just a brief period of time, but I found it striking.
- berntb 10y ago
  Look up the OSI standards. They were a horror to implement and use. The telecom companies wanted those to be used instead of the US tcp/ip stack. They would have had much more control and could have been fat cats, taking a large piece of the slice. Be damn happy they failed. :-) A heterogeneous world is an advantage, it gets harder for oligopolies to charge at every gate.
  - raattgift 10y ago
    There was a substantial overlap between the then Internet Activities Board and the committees associated with ISO/IEC 7498, and it was far from dominated by telecomms companies at the time. Indeed, Lyman Chapin of BBN was in ca. 1992 the chair of both! Other overlappers included Christian Huitema and IIRC Dave Katz. The OSI reference model itself originated with Charles Bachman (Honeywell, then IBM). So far, no telecomms companies to be seen. Telecomms companies and agencies were more interested in EDI in the form of X.400(84) and to some extent X.500 directory services, rather than in the lower layers, and while they were heavily invested in X.25, they were not the biggest pushers for the connection-oriented lower layers -- there were plenty of private X.25 networks operated by government agencies (including many non-PTT ones; bear in mind that the CCITT of the time was national governments represented by their local postal-telegraph-and-telecommunications ministries; the U.S. and Canada were huge outliers in having privately owned commercial telcos). There were also research & education networks with X.25 underneath, including CSNET (largely based in the USA) which was definitely part of the TCP/IP-speaking Internet. OSI's problems weren't in the people involved or in the (admittedly heavy) formalisms that go into ISO/IEC/CCITT/ITU standards, but rather that the idea was to redo TCP/IP "right", and that included supporting difficult to reconcile goals, like supporting both connection-less and connection-oriented protocols in most of the lowest of the 7 layers, and then mechanisms to provide interoperability between CO-only and CL-only talkers. At the time, well before FPGAs and ASICs were accelerating routers, and when megabytes of RAM were expensive (and slow), OSI appeared too heavyweight compared to TCP/IP, and that is one of many reasons TCP/IP won. OSI reference implementations were expensive rather than free as in beer (sort-of); compiling up your OSI elements took considerably longer; an OSI-equipped kernel was fat (too fat if it was only really talking ES-IS and nothing else); and so forth. SMTP/TCP/IP was what members of the OSI subcommittees were using to communicate with one another, in spite of the existence of EAN for X.400 and some native OSI CLNP (AlterNet, UUNET's internetwork, in the very early 1990s carried real CLNP traffic between RAND and several other organizations). Internet protocols did benefit from the OSI development work; good ideas from IDRP found their way into BGP4; IS-IS is still the IGP of choice for some large IP networks; LDAP, SNMP and others absorbed good ideas from X.500 and EFTAM; and of course DSL and OTN systems have a lot of OSI in their DNA. Finally, the U.S. government's GOSIP and similar programmes for mandatory adoption of OSI networking elsewhere probably doomed OSI networking much more than politics (and personality conflicts) among people involved in actually making the standards in the various bodies, both international (and national) and in the IETF and its close relatives. Taking profile "short cuts" to roll out OSI networking rapidly in that way raised the real possibility of fully conforming OSI networks (and stacks) that would nevertheless be mutually incompatible! Unfortunately many of the lessons learned in the failure of OSI networking were not applied in the process of choosing and standardizing a successor protocol for IP, and here we are a couple decades later with IPv6 being a compromise specification designed for speed of roll out... (In fact some of the wrong lessons learned in the very early 1990s of OSI networking are in IPv6 today: the expectation that being CPU constrained, routers must deal with relatively short, fixed-length, fixed-format fields (rather than, say, something self-describing) is front-and-centre in IPv6 addressing and headers generally. Concerns about overheads are also well-reflected in IPv6, and for terrestrial applications, those concerns were obsoleted by the turn of the century.) "A hetereogeneous world is an advantage". Well, try explaining that on the IETF mailing list as a reason to support concurrent development of a successor protocol to IPv6.
- retro64 10y ago
  I'm not sure what to make of this comment. Are you implying the US didn't have cell phones in the late 90's? Even I had a cell phone, and still have my original (looks the one midway down on this page (http://www.mobilephonehistory.co.uk/motorola/motorola_list.php http://www.mobilephonehistory.co.uk/motorola/motorola_list.p...) - a Motorola flip (MicroTAC)). Notice the timelines as well. These were analog networks at first, but mobile was very popular here in the 90's.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    No, he is talking about GSM being a pan-european standard made companies and carriers compete on features and services rather than lock-in. Especially as GSM enforced the use of SIM cards that made it easy to move phones between carrier, or buy a phone outside of carrier offerings. Observe in contrast how Verizon is massive in USA thanks to being one of two (Sprint being the other) CDMA carrier. I keep seeing Americans lament that they want to pick up some new phone, but can't because they are grandfathered into some Verizon contract or other.
badmadrad 10y ago
"Socialist-like" policies usually work when they have militaristic end goals. The reason is that the govt is actually incentivized to maintain its power and protect it citizenry. Most even right leaning people would agree that government spending in this case actually makes sense because the government is directly acting in its own interests much like a private company does.