[TUHS] OSI stack (Was: Posters)

Warner Losh imp at bsdimp.com
Thu Feb 7 03:16:24 AEST 2019


On Mon, Feb 4, 2019 at 8:43 PM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Feb 3, 2019, 8:03 AM Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu wrote:
>
>>     > From: Warner Losh
>>
>>     > a bunch of OSI/ISO network stack posters (thank goodness that didn't
>>     > become standard, woof!)
>>
>> Why?
>>
>
> Posters like this :). OSI was massively over specified...
>

oops. Hit the list limit.

Posters like this:

https://people.freebsd.org/~imp/20190203_215836.jpg

which show just how over-specified it was. I also worked at The Wollongong
Group back in the early 90's and it was a total dog on the SysV 386
machines that we were trying to demo it on. A total and unbelievable PITA
to set it up, and crappy performance once we got it going. Almost bad
enough that we didn't show it at the trade show we were going to....  And
that was just the lower layers of the stack plus basic name service. x.400
email addresses were also somewhat overly verbose. In many ways, it was a
classic second system effect because they were trying to fix everything
they thought was wrong with TCP/IP at the time without really, truly
knowing the differences between actual problems and mere annoyances and how
to properly weight the severity of the issue in coming up with their
solutions.

So x.400 vs smtp mail addresses:
"G=Warner;S=Losh;O=WarnerLoshConsulting;PRMD=bsdimp;A=comcast;C=us" vis "
imp at bsdimp.com"

(assuming I got all the weird bits of the x.400 address right, it's been a
long time and google had no good examples on the first page I could just
steal...) The x.400 addresses were so unwieldy that a directory service was
added on top of them x.500, which was every bit as baroque IIRC.

TP4 might not have been that bad, but all the stuff above it was kinda
crazy...

Warner
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20190206/061e62c4/attachment.html>


More information about the TUHS mailing list