>By 1983 the Internet protocols were already being recast in OSI terms.
I think it started before that. In September 1982 Padlipsky wrote RFC
871, reacting to the increasing perception that ISO had somehow invented
the concept of layering:
> Despite the fact that "the ARPANET" stands as the
> proof-of-concept of intercomputer networking and, as discussed in
> more detail below, introduced such fundamental notions as
> Layering and Virtualizing to the literature, the wide
> availability of material which appeals to the International
> Standards Organization's Reference Model for Open System
> Interconnection (ISORM) has prompted many new- comers to the
> field to overlook the fact that, even though it was largely
> tacit, the designers of the ARPANET protocol suite have had a
> reference model of their own all the long. That is, since well
> before ISO even took an interest in "networking", workers in the
> ARPA-sponsored research community have been going about their
> business of doing research and development in intercomputer
> networking with a particular frame of reference in mind. They
> have, unfortunately, either been so busy with their work or were
> perhaps somehow unsuited temperamentally to do learned papers on
> abstract topics when there are interesting things to be said on
> specific topics, that it is only in very recent times that there
> has been much awareness in the research community of the impact
> of the ISORM on the lay mind. When the author is asked to review
> solemn memoranda comparing such things as the ARPANET treatment
> of "internetting" with that of CCITT employing the ISORM "as the
> frame of reference," however, the time has clearly come to
> attempt to enunciate the ARPANET Reference Model (ARM)
> publicly--for such comparisons are painfully close to comparing
> an orange with an apple using redness and smoothness as the
> dominant criteria, given the philosophical closeness of the CCITT
> and ISO models and their mutual disparities from the ARPANET
> model.
Stuart Cheshire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
* Wizard Without Portfolio, Apple Computer
* Chairman, IETF ZEROCONF
* www.stuartcheshire.org
