[TUHS] OSI stack (Was: Posters)

[Kevin Bowling]

On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 4:52 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Feb 06, 2019 at 04:40:24PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> > Seems like a case of winners write the history books.  There were
> > corporate and public access networks long before TCP was set in stone
> > as a dominant protocol.  Most F500 were interchanging on SNA into the
> > 1990s.  And access networks like Tymnet, etc to talk to others.
>
> Yeah, but those were all tied to some vendor.  TCP/IP was the first
> wide spread networking stack that you could get from a pile of different
> vendors, Sun, Dec, SGI, IBM's AIX, every kernel supported it.   System V
> was late to the party, Lachman bought the rights to Convergent's STREAMs
> based TCP/IP stack and had a tidy business for a while selling that stack
> to lots of places.  It was an awful stack, I know because I ported it to
> a super computer and then to SCO's UNIX.  When Sun switched to a System
> Vr4 kernel, they bought it in some crazy bad deal and tried to use it
> in Solaris.  That lead to the tcp latency benchmark in lmbench because
> Oracle's clustered database ran like shit on Slowaris and I traced it
> down to their distributed lock manager and then whittled that code
> down to lat_tcp.c.  Sun eventually dumped that stack and went with
> Mentat's code and tuned that back up.  Sun actually dumped the socket
> code and went just with STREAMs interfaces but was forced to bring
> back sockets.  Socket's aren't great but they won and there is no
> turning back.
>
> > TCP, coupled with the rise of UNIX and the free wheel sharing of BSD
> > code, are what made the people to talk to.
>
> BSD wasn't free until much later than TCP/IP.  TCP/IP was developed in
> the 1970's.
>
> http://www.securenet.net/members/shartley/history/tcp_ip.htm
>
> https://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_tcpip.htm

This is where I am out of my depth, was it a "success" before the
mid-late '80s as some dominant force?  My reading is no outside
universities with UNIX/BSD.  The meteoric success came a bit later in
the '80s with NSFNET, the rise of Cisco, and then the internet
exchange culture in the early '90s CIX, PAIX, Metropolitan Fiber
Systems etc got us to today and off Bell System stuff.