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I once implemented a part of RFC1006, a way to use ISO protocols on the internet. It contains gems like: In migrating from the use of TCP/IP to the ISO prot

I once implemented a part of RFC1006, a way to use ISO protocols on the internet. It contains gems like: In migrating from the use of TCP/IP to the ISO protocols Whoever wrote that RFC seemed to think of the internet as some temporary stopgap measure until responsible adults found the time to implement a real network protocol. My main takeway was: Thank god the internet won, OSI was some badly specified eldritch horror. RFC1006 was the only spec that seemed more or less readable by a human being.

unmole 6y ago
The only ISO protocol that seems better designed than its IETF counterpart is IS-IS. Which is why it is still widely used. The spec is still hopelessly unreadable though.
- bombcar 6y ago
  "ISIS" is an unfortunate name for a Protocol.
  - unmole 6y ago
    It's pronounced IS-IS. The hyphen is important.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ASalazarMX 6y ago
    "ISIS" is an unfortunate name for a Protocol, please change it. Yours truly: Mr. Bombcar
- jcrawfordor 6y ago
  This was supposed to be in the article but, I'll be honest, I wrote it over a vacation and stopped and started several times and some things got lost in the shuffle. I find IS-IS particularly interesting because, to summarize somewhat aggressively, TCP/IP first went into use basically without any working gateway protocols. So in early IP networks it was very common to use a full chunk of the OSI layer (IS-IS and CLNP) just to use IS-IS with IP prefixes shoehorned in, as the "IP" gateway protocol. OSPF is basically exactly this but formalized and running IS-IS over IP so you don't need the lower OSI layers. I'm sure there are still some IP networks out there today using the OSI stack for promulgating IP routes, it seems to still be well supported by all the vendors.
p_l 6y ago
Because IPv4 was a temporary, stopgap solution. That's why it has 32bit addressing, when by late 1980s the need for larger address space for Internet was already well understood (that's partly why OSI does 20bytes for address). The spec is wordy, but CLNS and TP4 differ little from IP and TCP, except for TP4 not having legacy of being a dumb emulated serial port, so it has message framing. Most of verbiage comes from the part that OSI took pains to handle a lot of problems upfront instead of saying "eh, it's temporary, let's go shopping", and writing standards with strict requirements tended to have certain verbiage allowing one to specify in minutiae what was missing from implementation, with no Postel around to promote lax handling. N.B. a pretty serious (and implemented on Cisco and Sun) proposal to fix the already-known addressing problem of IPv4 was TUBA - which is essentially TCP running on top of CLNS.
- HourglassFR 6y ago
  Agree, the OSI model was what smart people who thought deeply about the issue decided we should do. Unfortunatly the timing was bad and the coherent model emerged just a bit to late. Maybe if the major networking infrastructures had been in Europe a switch could have been a possibility. Americans are very pragmatic: make the stuff work and get on with your life, if problems arise in the future we will fix them. American standards are usually but a formalisation of already accepted practises (and this goes well beyond network stuff), this is why they are so effective and so poorly thought out. I guess it's still better than "ideals" that nobody follows. And of course this is an oversimplification of some sensitivity difference between vast parts of the world, we individuals are but samples on the agregate sociological context that drives this sort of things.
  - simiones 6y ago
    > he OSI model was what smart people who thought deeply about the issue decided we should do. And yet, they came up with 2 layers of stuff that only a limited number of applications actually use (session, presentation), 2 protocols instead of one at layers 2 and 3, a much more complex layer 4 protocol. The application side of network programming would likely be much more difficult if we had used an OSI network instead of TCP/IP.
ggm 6y ago
> RFC1006, Marshall Rose. he's a fantastic coder, and wrote the Open Book and the Simple Book and has done a lot of work in protocols, and IETF standards. I have a lot of time for Marshall. he did a lot of work on MH, the mailsystem I used for years. The Simple book is why we have SNMP and not CMIP (in some ways)

unmole 6y ago

The only ISO protocol that seems better designed than its IETF counterpart is IS-IS. Which is why it is still widely used. The spec is still hopelessly unreadable though.

bombcar 6y ago
"ISIS" is an unfortunate name for a Protocol.
- unmole 6y ago
  It's pronounced IS-IS. The hyphen is important.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ASalazarMX 6y ago
  "ISIS" is an unfortunate name for a Protocol, please change it. Yours truly: Mr. Bombcar
jcrawfordor 6y ago
This was supposed to be in the article but, I'll be honest, I wrote it over a vacation and stopped and started several times and some things got lost in the shuffle. I find IS-IS particularly interesting because, to summarize somewhat aggressively, TCP/IP first went into use basically without any working gateway protocols. So in early IP networks it was very common to use a full chunk of the OSI layer (IS-IS and CLNP) just to use IS-IS with IP prefixes shoehorned in, as the "IP" gateway protocol. OSPF is basically exactly this but formalized and running IS-IS over IP so you don't need the lower OSI layers. I'm sure there are still some IP networks out there today using the OSI stack for promulgating IP routes, it seems to still be well supported by all the vendors.

p_l 6y ago

Because IPv4 was a temporary, stopgap solution. That's why it has 32bit addressing, when by late 1980s the need for larger address space for Internet was already well understood (that's partly why OSI does 20bytes for address). The spec is wordy, but CLNS and TP4 differ little from IP and TCP, except for TP4 not having legacy of being a dumb emulated serial port, so it has message framing. Most of verbiage comes from the part that OSI took pains to handle a lot of problems upfront instead of saying "eh, it's temporary, let's go shopping", and writing standards with strict requirements tended to have certain verbiage allowing one to specify in minutiae what was missing from implementation, with no Postel around to promote lax handling. N.B. a pretty serious (and implemented on Cisco and Sun) proposal to fix the already-known addressing problem of IPv4 was TUBA - which is essentially TCP running on top of CLNS.

HourglassFR 6y ago
Agree, the OSI model was what smart people who thought deeply about the issue decided we should do. Unfortunatly the timing was bad and the coherent model emerged just a bit to late. Maybe if the major networking infrastructures had been in Europe a switch could have been a possibility. Americans are very pragmatic: make the stuff work and get on with your life, if problems arise in the future we will fix them. American standards are usually but a formalisation of already accepted practises (and this goes well beyond network stuff), this is why they are so effective and so poorly thought out. I guess it's still better than "ideals" that nobody follows. And of course this is an oversimplification of some sensitivity difference between vast parts of the world, we individuals are but samples on the agregate sociological context that drives this sort of things.
- simiones 6y ago
  > he OSI model was what smart people who thought deeply about the issue decided we should do. And yet, they came up with 2 layers of stuff that only a limited number of applications actually use (session, presentation), 2 protocols instead of one at layers 2 and 3, a much more complex layer 4 protocol. The application side of network programming would likely be much more difficult if we had used an OSI network instead of TCP/IP.

ggm 6y ago

> RFC1006, Marshall Rose. he's a fantastic coder, and wrote the Open Book and the Simple Book and has done a lot of work in protocols, and IETF standards. I have a lot of time for Marshall. he did a lot of work on MH, the mailsystem I used for years. The Simple book is why we have SNMP and not CMIP (in some ways)