Data communications over telegraph circuits 1928

in the late 80s there was some similar comments about the background of people that were responsible for OSI work in ISO (not so much telecommunications background, ... more specifically the references were to voice-grade point-to-point copper wire background). Also, n this period, govts, including US federal, were mandating the elimination of internet and tcp-ip to be replaced with OSI.

furthermore ISO had rule out that ISO and ISO-chartered standards bodies couldn't do standards work on protocols that violated OSI.

there was a proposal for high-speed protocol

to x3s3.3 .. the ISO-chartered ansi standard body that was responsible for protocols at level 3&4 in OSI.

it was rejected for violating osi:

1) hsp would go directly from level 4-5 interface (transport) directly to LAN interface. this bypbutted level 3-4 interface (network) violating osi

2) hsp would support internetworking protocol ... internetworking didn't exist in osi ... and supporting something that didn't exist in OSI was violation of OSI.

3) hsp would go directly from level 4-5 interface (transport) directly to LAN interface. LAN interface sits somewhere in the middle of OSI level 3 ... violating OSI ... and therefor protocol that supported LAN interface (which violated OSI) was also violation of OSI.

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a lot of mainframe world got wrapped around SNA ... basically a host-centric centralized computer communication operation (not a networking infrastructure) oriented towards managing large numbers of dumb terminals.

my wife did work on real networking architecture ... in the same time-frame that SNA was coming into being ... but got huge push-back

she then got con'ed into POK to being in charge of loosely-couupled architecture ... where she put together peer-coupled shared-data architecture. it did see a little take-up with ims hot-standby ... but really didn't come into its own until parallel sysplex

although we did leverage peer-coupled infrastructure when we were doing ha-cmp

we also had sort of a funny anecdote from high-speed data transport work (project name specifically chosen to differentiate it from communication)

we were contracting for some high-speed gear from the far east. the friday before a business trip to the far east (to look at some of the hardware) ... one of the people from SNA announced a new online discussion group on networking ... and provided the following definitions for basis of some of the discussion:

medium-speed 19.2kbits high-speed 56kbits very high-speed 1.5mbits

the following monday on the wall of a conference room outside tokyo:

medium-speed 100mbits high-speed 200-300mbits

I don't know if it was true or not ... but one of our vendors (in the US) claimed that somebody from AT&T had come by later and asked them to build a duplicate set of gear of whatever they were building for HSDT.

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