
OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t - florent_k
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt
======
npsimons
As usual, /usr/games/fortune provides some insightful commentary:

"On the other hand, the TCP camp also has a phrase for OSI people. There are
lots of phrases. My favorite is `nitwit' \-- and the rationale is the Internet
philosophy has always been you have extremely bright, non-partisan researchers
look at a topic, do world-class research, do several competing
implementations, have a bake-off, determine what works best, write it down and
make that the standard.

The OSI view is entirely opposite. You take written contributions from a much
larger community, you put the contributions in a room of committee people
with, quite honestly, vast political differences and all with their own
political axes to grind, and four years later you get something out, usually
without it ever having been implemented once.

So the Internet perspective is implement it, make it work well, then write it
down, whereas the OSI perspective is to agree on it, write it down, circulate
it a lot and now we'll see if anyone can implement it after it's an
international standard and every vendor in the world is committed to it. One
of those processes is backwards, and I don't think it takes a Lucasian
professor of physics at Oxford to figure out which."

\-- Marshall Rose, "The Pied Piper of OSI"

~~~
nknighthb
This is why every time Mozilla starts whining about Google playing with new
things without consulting everybody else first (e.g. Dart, NaCl), I lose more
respect for them (actually, at this point, they've pretty well exhausted it
all). Basic advancement comes from somebody deciding to try something new, not
from getting everybody to agree on what comes next.

~~~
aidenn0
It's slightly different because Google is in a relatively unique position of
being able to unilaterally deploy new technology, as they both serve a large
fraction of the traffic on the internet, and have a very popular browser.

Mozilla is understandably wary about new technologies from Google, because it
would be very easy for them to make it so that the best youtube experience can
only happen in chrome, which would be quite detrimental to Mozilla.

~~~
kisielk
Just because they can do large deployments doesn't mean it will be successful.
Look at what happened with Buzz and Wave for example.

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ChuckMcM
I think one of the subtleties that is overlooked is that by being the "future"
of networking, OSI drew in all the "big guns" who worked hard to control it to
their advantage. Whether it was the folks at IBM who were pushing Token
Ring/SNA, or Netware, or anything really. Since it was the standard to be,
influencing _it_ was the high priority.

That allowed the IETF to continue in relative calm and without serious
interference during the 80's. That all changed in the 90's when people started
figuring out they were betting on the wrong horse.

In 1993 at the 27th IETF [1] I put forth the proposal that this code we had
all been using (RPC/XDR) that was described in various informational RFCs
(RFC1057/RFC1014) which everyone treated like a 'standard' actually be blessed
as a standard. Pretty much the consensus was that it was a fine idea except
that forces at that point that were rather anti "Sun" went out of their way to
kill it. It was sad to watch, and folks who had been going to IETF meetings
for a decade or more were appalled but damned if it had become impossible for
the IETF to bless something as a standard any more. That really soured me on
'standards' for a long time.

[1] Pg: 533 Advances in ONC
[http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/27.pdf](http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/27.pdf)

------
rogerbinns
There were also some differences in design tastes. For example OSI went with
ASN.1[1] for binary descriptions rather than plain and simple. TCP and IP just
use 8/16/32 bit fields in a predefined byte ordering and that is it. That
makes TCP/IP considerably easier to eyeball.

In higher level protocols like email, the TCP/IP world tended towards ASCII
based protocols which are far more flexible and future proof, while OSI again
did ASN.1. I once worked on an X.400 (OSI Email) gateway and was highly amused
that they defined a different error code for every possible reason an email
could be refused. There were pages of them (including recipient is dead!)
while SMTP allowed for arbitrary text and an overal numeric code to indicate
the type of error. Again you can see which was easier to eyeball and diagnose.

Practicality tends to be very effective.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Syntax_Notation_One](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Syntax_Notation_One)

~~~
nucleardog
I've implemented ASN.1 BER from scratch before (don't ask). If "three
different string formats" doesn't say designed by committee, I don't know what
does.

Sounds like OSI would have been an internet built on what is essentially
binary-encoded XML. I'd say we dodged a bullet.

------
tlb
The danger of committees is that it's easy for a few members to add tremendous
complexity. Why would anyone do that? Isn't "easy to understand and simple to
implement" always a goal of everyone working on tech standards?

Not if you're a big company competing with small companies. Adding 10 man-
years of implementation effort is a small thing for IBM- or Cisco-sized
companies, but a giant barrier to entry for upstart competitors. Also,
vagueness in the spec requires extensive testing to make things interoperate
reliably, which favors big incumbents.

These aren't just emergent, subconscious effects. I've been in on discussions
about making a spec harder to implement to frustrate competitors. (not with
any YC companies)

The dark forces of competitive advantage affect non-committee specs too.
Microsoft SMB is an example. The x86 instruction set is another.

~~~
dlitz
> Why would anyone do that? Isn't "easy to understand and simple to implement"
> always a goal of everyone working on tech standards?

Patents and "competitive advantage".

------
mcguire
" _Everything was up for debate—even trivial nuances of language, like the
difference between 'you will comply' and 'you should comply,' triggered
complaints._"

That's not actually a trivial nuance---those are significantly different
semantic behaviors. IETF RFC's use "MUST" and "SHOULD" (yes, in caps) for the
same distinction.

------
bandy
…but we're going to keep asking questions about the 7 layer model in
interviews as if it were useful in the real world because that's what we
learned about in school.

~~~
kabdib
"I hear they're going to 42 layers because it's a sacred number in Bali."

Not from this guy. I might ask you to critique the 7 layer model, or provide
me with ideas for speeding things up by skipping layers.

It's all mushed together in real stacks anyway, with dogs down in the cat
layer, and mice doing double duty both at the metal and up there in the UI. I
swear to god, OSI would have been standardizing finger lengths for keyboard
interaction if someone had let them.

~~~
bandy
I counter with the 9-layer model and that causes them to ask a more relevant
question. This happens a lot when you're receiving a generic interview from a
US Megacorp that has only recently ditched irrelevant (save for "how does this
person think") quizzes for cross-functional interviews from people whose
function is far removed from what you thought you were going to be
interviewing for. (They all seem to have migrated to this strategy, for what
that's worth.)

------
bcRIPster
I can never see the term OSI an not think of this classic. It gave me and
friends a good laugh back in the day ;p (original site down but this is a
mirror)

[http://pablotron.org/files/7_layer_burrito.html](http://pablotron.org/files/7_layer_burrito.html)

------
tytso
I remember reading with great amusement an article written by an X.400
proponent, sometime in the late 80's, asserting that X.400 would start to
dominate SMTP once the telecoms got the price of sending an X.400 message
under a dollar per e-mail. (And this was back in the 80's, when dollars were
bigger back then!)

Thus proving that the OSI folks really didn't have a clue....

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r4pha
I had always looked to the OSI model as a _frame_ thought which a communition
channel can be analysed. If I intercept my internet cable, I assume I can
idealy measure the signal and fit it on the 7 layers of the OSI model. I fail
(honestly) to see how that is a failure, as seems to be the starting point.
Isn't the OSI model _one_ way to look at a medium?

~~~
jerf
That was not the original intention. That is the story that for some reason
network professors continue to tell themselves as a reason to teach this
model. The original intent was for there to be 7 clear layers, with various
protocols for each.

Why the profs stick so close to this instead of teaching a more realistic
model is beyond me. Why use an inaccurate theoretical model when you could use
an accurate one instead? It's going to be simplified relative to reality
either way, as befits a model, but it might as well be a correct
simplification. I mean, it's not like the OSI 7-layer model is a mathematical
truth or anything... it's just an artifact produced by a committee a long time
ago.

To anyone leaping up to defend it, let me set the frame I'll be judging the
defenses by in advance: If the real world was as it is today except there was
no such thing as the OSI model, and someone proposed the 7-layer model _today_
as a model for understanding the network for the very first time, would you
_really_ consider your defense as a reason to go with it, even despite the
fact the model is actively inaccurate? I don't think inertia is an adequate
defense to stick with something, when we aren't even using it anyhow... what
_real_ inertia does it have?

~~~
adammil
Why do you say the OSI model is unrealistic? Writing the simplest Hello World
web service call takes advantage of the OSI model, even though you might not
notice it unless you also write network drivers and manufacture network cards.
In fact, I've worked at companies where it would be accidentally accurate if
you simply labelled the dev teams with the layer of the OSI model their work
corresponds with. You practically can't read a network sniffer trace unless
you understand the OSI reference model.

~~~
kabdib
> You practically can't read a network sniffer trace unless you understand the
> OSI reference model

I read these all the time. I can't remember the last time I needed to know
what the OSI layers were called; they're utterly irrelevant to networking as
near as I can tell.

~~~
adammil
I was referring to the whole concept of the model and the purpose of the
layers, not simply reciting from memory the names of the layers.

~~~
andrewflnr
You don't need the OSI model to understand layers of abstraction. Since the
OSI model doesn't fit the observed layers very well, it seems pretty useless
from that perspective.

------
walshemj
Interesting and we can see the outcome of the palace revolt is IPv6 OSI
/telecoms guys would have insisted on having a workable inter-operation plan.

EX X.400 hacker here I used to have root on the UK ADMD back in the day :-)

------
hga
Not too impressed with this account, which I will admit starting to skim
around halfway. E.g.:

I'm not sure the author realizes TCP is a virtual circuit protocol (then again
I'm sure OSI had one or more much heavier weight ones).

The _real_ fatal flaw of OSI, before even getting to the point of finding out
if their protocols worked---many of them _did_ get far enough in
standardization process---was their going to ISO in the first place. If you
just needed to get things done, the difference between spending around $2,000
($1,000 in 1988 dollars) to buy a shelf of the standards documents, or $0 or
thereabouts to get all the RFCs (chicken and egg, you might need to buy a CD
or a tape to get them to your systems), made a very big difference.

If you're really interested in all this, I highly recommend Padlipsky's very
opinionated " _The Elements of Networking Style: And Other Essays &
Animadversions on the Art of Intercomputer Networking_"
([http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Networking-Style-
Animadversio...](http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Networking-Style-
Animadversions-Intercomputer/dp/0595088791)), a very colorful work with
rhetorical gems like "gilding the ragweed".

~~~
mjn
> spending around $2,000 ($1,000 in 1988 dollars) to buy a shelf of the
> standards documents

The ISLISP standardization group did an interesting workaround for this:
[http://www.islisp.info/history.html](http://www.islisp.info/history.html)

An ISO committee to standardize the language was constituted but stalled on
doing any real work drafting a standard. While they waited around, the
community drew up a draft standard, which was published as a public
recommendation to the ISO committee, with the draft put into the public
domain. The committee then voted to adopt the community's draft as the
standard unchanged. So now an official ISO document is available for the usual
fee, but you can get a predecessor document that looks surprisingly similar,
for free as a PDF.

Of course, this requires everyone on the committee agreeing to not really take
the ISO process seriously. You might wonder why one would bother with it at
all then, and in this case it seems to have been to reassure clients that
ISLISP is stable by getting it an ISO standard.

~~~
hga
Reminds me of how I always used drafts of the ANSI SCSI standard, or vendor
documents.

" _in this case it seems to have been to reassure clients that ISLISP is
stable by getting it an ISO standard_ "

Which is a nice hat trick if nobody uses the actual standards document ...
although I suppose Franz and perhaps a few others did buy a copy....

