Re: Quantifying OSI

On 5/11/2026 4:33 PM, Michael Grant via Internet-history wrote:
> Anyway, from start to finish of this episode of my life, I could never 
> understand how this stuff would really work and boy oh boy did I try 
> to make it work.  Nobody around me either gave a crap if it worked.  
> Nobody around me at the technical level believed this stuff would 
> overtake tcp/ip which was getting more and more popular and more and 
> more companies were getting hooked in. 


I'll add another thank you for the detailed, cross-culture (networking) 
life story.

When I worked for a company that sold TCP/IP stacks, a very large 
fraction of our revenue came from Europe, the purported hotbed of OSI.  
As icing, I like that one of my larger customers the ISO IT team...

As Einar Stefferud summarized:  “OSI is a beautiful dream, and TCP/IP 
<https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/tcp-ip> is living it!”

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt

My own summary was that the OSI community did a superb job of marketing, 
creating a strong demand for open systems, and TCP/IP did a superb job 
of satisfying the demand.


d/

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Dave Crocker

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