On 16/01/2016 06:50, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: ... > Thing is that the first time I was in a meeting at which an OSI > transition plan was discussed was July or so of 1992. And it was very > much pre-planning since the only vendor that was pushing OSI > networking was Digital and DECnet Phase V wasn't due for several > years. Funny that, since I wrote CERN's networking policy in 1985 and it was OSI based [1][2]. And then I demolished it in 1988 [3] and 1989 [4]. However, do remember that in July 1992, OSI/CLNP was a very serious candidate for IPng, and remained so for the next two years. > So we were starting efforts at the very time IETF was shutting them down. DECnet Phase IV had already run out of addresses and we needed Phase V for that reason alone. It was indeed a dead end, but you may recall that some of the physics experiments were so deeply committed to VAX/VMS that they wouldn't contemplate anything other than DECnet. We did deploy Phase V starting late 1994 [5], and we did repeatedly ask Digital to support DECnet upper layers over TCP/IP. But we all know how that ended. Quoting my own book "The end of that story is a sad one: we just about got the high-energy physics DECnets converted to Phase V when it was time to switch them off, since everyone had started using TCP/IP instead." All the same, the history of the IETF would have been utterly different if they had ignored OSI back in 1986. Brian [1] Computer Communications at CERN, Conf. 'Computing in High Energy Physics', Amsterdam, June 1985, proceedings ed. L.O.Hertzberger and W.Hoogland, North-Holland, 1986. [2] CERN Data Communications Policy, CERN internal report DD/85/14, July 1985. [3] COSINE Implementation Phase: the View from a Major Site, RARE Networkshop 1988, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 16 (1988) 121. [4] Is OSI Too Late?, RARE Networkshop 1989, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 17 (1989) 284. [5] Denise Heagerty, 'Running DECnet/OSI (Phase V) at CERN', CERN Computer Newsletter 217, 1994.