3 ms·

I'm not sure your example matches your mantra. OSI was usable before ISPs became a thing, you ran OSI over X.25.

• csours 9y ago
  X.25 isn't the whole networking stack. Elements of OSI were available, and are still available, but most people use something else because it's easier: good enough, soon enough.
  • rjsw 9y ago
    I was developing for OSI at a time when it was not possible to do equivalent things on a WAN in Europe using TCP/IP. TCP/IP didn't win by being first.
    • csours 9y ago
      How did TCP/IP win?
      • rjsw 9y ago
        I'm not sure that the OSI people even realized that they were in competition with anything else. I think they basically neglected the low end of the market. At the time there were multiple LAN protocols that were mostly used for file sharing, Netware, Appletalk, NetBEUI, etc. You had NFS for TCP/IP but it wasn't really used for anything other than UNIX workstations. Probably it would have required somebody to write a cut-down OSI stack for MS-DOS that could be linked to a particular killer application (whatever that was, maybe FTAM). This would still have had to compete with the way that TCP/IP was able to swallow up the other LAN protocols, we wouldn't have had to go through the IPv4 to IPv6 migration though.