Re: NT was written before the Internet says security expert
From: Jeff Liebermann (jeffl_at_comix.santa-cruz.ca.us)
Date: 03/09/04
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Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2004 09:12:52 -0800
On Mon, 8 Mar 2004 18:29:24 +0000 (UTC), tony@pcunix.com wrote:
>I remember sitting in a meeting early 1994 where the owner of
>a large VAR said "Microsoft will NEVER go with tcp/ip". I said
>"I think you are very wrong" and I'm pretty sure everyone else
>at the table thought I was an idiot :-)
At the time, everyone was betting on the OSI protocol stack. TCP/IP
was universally declared by all the magazine articles to be an
inferior temporary solution that would be shortly replaced by the
operating systems based on the OSI model. Never mind that there was
exactly one company (3Com) that bothered to actually produce an OSI
network product. OSI was going to replace TCP/IP real soon now. So
it was written, so it must be.
Every article included a layer cake comparing the TCP/IP and OSI
models with various attempts to cram TCP/IP into the OSI 7 layer
model. It really did look like a square peg crammed into a round hole
and was often used to justify why TCP/IP was insufficiently elegant.
Along with the ISO stack came X.400 email and X.500 directory
services. I was using X.400 email for many years on Sprintmail/JANET
(until they pulled the plug in late 2001) and can honestly declare it
to barely useable my humans. However, that didn't stop any of the
experts from prematurely declaring that everyone would soon drop
TCP/IP, Novell, Appletalk, SNA, Lan Manger, DLC, Banyan, and other
networking protocols, and immediately switch to OSI, X.400, and X.500.
It didn't happen.
The real innovation by Microsoft was implimenting *MULTIPLE* transport
protocols in Windoze 3.1 through NDIS and ODI network interfaces.
Within reasonable limitations, you could run NETBIOS over multiple
transport protocols. This was new as other network products tended to
support only one transport protocol at a time. The benifit to
Microsoft is that it could easily handle transitions from other
protocols to Microsoft products. It was many years later that Novell
finally added TCP/IP support to Netware 3.1, but only if you left the
IPX/SPX stack in place.
Microsoft probably wanted to impliment an OSI stack in preperation for
the predicted mass migration. However, it was by far the most complex
and difficult protocol available. My guess(tm) was that by the early
1990's, Windoze 3.1 was considered to be a transition product to
Windoze 95, and that any OSI development would be on the Windoze 95
platform. When the predicted OSI mass migration didn't happen,
Microsoft probably quietly dropped development of an OSI product.
The lack of useable products did not seem to stop the magazines from
predicting the demise of TCP/IP and the triumph of OSI. By 1994, this
was almost dogma. The continued use of TCP/IP was sufficiently in
doubt that Novell once proposed an internet based on IPX/SPX. It
could have been done as most Cisco routers would route IPX/SPX as well
as TCP/IP.
In 1994, predicting the demise of TCP/IP, was almost a sure thing if
you believed the trade rags.
-- Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060 (831)421-6491 pgr (831)336-2558 home http://www.LearnByDestroying.com AE6KS jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us jeffl@cruzio.com
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