3 ms·

You could download the TCP/IP standards for free. The OSI standards were thousands of dollars, I believe; a classic Big Standards move. I think the writing wa

by kabdib 6y ago

You could download the TCP/IP standards for free. The OSI standards were thousands of dollars, I believe; a classic Big Standards move. I think the writing was on the wall, right there. You're in college, what do you think the computer science folks are implementing and trying to improve, and teaching? Certainly not anything that cost real money, or that involved a towering bureaucracy, or language that no one could comprehend. I remember the Arpanet flip-over from NCP to TCP, and that was a big deal. The TCP community had early experience implementing and getting stuff running at scale (for the time), with real users and expectations that things would more or less stay working. "I hear they're moving to 42 layers, because it's a sacred number in Bali." -- Michael Padlipsky Nobody knew what those 7 layers were for. Nobody.

Mauricebranagh 6y ago
Its quite clear what the 7 layers where for. Your right that ISO's charging an arm and a leg for the printed docs was a mistake. And the big switch only worked because it was done during the summer holidays and you could shut down things whilst it was done. OSI would have not had the Omnishambles that is ipv6
- dtech 6y ago
  It's clear what the 7 layers do, but not why there are 7, and not say 4 or 11.
  - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
    Seven is what the OSI standard says :-) Some people say there is an eighth layer which is of course "Politics"
    - sekh60 6y ago
      8th layer is generally the user in sysadmin circles
- kabdib 6y ago
  The transition date for TCP was Jan 1, 1983 (see RFC 801 and various other documents by Crocker, et al). I don't recall any shutdowns, though my Arpanet access at the time was limited to a dial-up TIP and some PDP-10s at MIT, and I might not have noticed. There wasn't any kind of summer holiday shutdown at the university I was at, nor at NBS (where I was interning). The grad-level computer networking course I was taking in early '82 mentioned ISO (we used Tannenbaum, recently published, as a base text). The professor pretty much threw his hands up at all the ISO layers. "This is not how you implement networking in real life." There's a lot to like in IPV6, as well as some things to hate. Transitions remain difficult, but seem unavoidable (sooo much software smuggles IP addresses in 32-bit ints, and changing millions of lines of code and updating database schemas to match is not very much fun).

by kabdib 6y ago

Mauricebranagh 6y ago

Its quite clear what the 7 layers where for. Your right that ISO's charging an arm and a leg for the printed docs was a mistake. And the big switch only worked because it was done during the summer holidays and you could shut down things whilst it was done. OSI would have not had the Omnishambles that is ipv6

dtech 6y ago
It's clear what the 7 layers do, but not why there are 7, and not say 4 or 11.
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  Seven is what the OSI standard says :-) Some people say there is an eighth layer which is of course "Politics"
  - sekh60 6y ago
    8th layer is generally the user in sysadmin circles
kabdib 6y ago
The transition date for TCP was Jan 1, 1983 (see RFC 801 and various other documents by Crocker, et al). I don't recall any shutdowns, though my Arpanet access at the time was limited to a dial-up TIP and some PDP-10s at MIT, and I might not have noticed. There wasn't any kind of summer holiday shutdown at the university I was at, nor at NBS (where I was interning). The grad-level computer networking course I was taking in early '82 mentioned ISO (we used Tannenbaum, recently published, as a base text). The professor pretty much threw his hands up at all the ISO layers. "This is not how you implement networking in real life." There's a lot to like in IPV6, as well as some things to hate. Transitions remain difficult, but seem unavoidable (sooo much software smuggles IP addresses in 32-bit ints, and changing millions of lines of code and updating database schemas to match is not very much fun).