On 3/18/22 6:18 PM, bzs@theworld.com wrote:
I remember in the 80s getting into a rather detailed debate with an OSI fan about how OSI put at least authorization into what we'd call the IP layer roughly, CLNP/CLNS/TP0-4.
A lot of it came down to you send me your initial handshake and I first see if you're authorized and if not reject you right there.
They were quite obsessed with authorization because they were quite obsessed with, basically, billing for every connection, who do I charge this connection to?
Particularly in the 80s it seemed way too much overhead at way too low of a level to me.
Almost 40 years later and maybe they were on to something.
Unfortunately I still suspect it would have thrown the baby right out with the bathwater. The overhead involved would have limited network nodes (at the time) to big, expensive boxes, like PBX's, with intricate authorization and billing mechanisms rather than what made TCP/IP take off.
Even in 1985 you could get a fully functional TCP/IP system running in cheap hardware most anyone with a steady job could afford rather than relegate such systems to SNA-like server/client architectures probably requiring intimate integration into telcos.
I wrote one of the first internet enabled laser printers (maybe the first) a couple of years later. It was work -- mostly TCP -- but it wasn't insurmountable. v6 was pretty ho-hum if it were to become a requirement. That and integrating with LPR which was a shitshow. The IP layer was trivial in comparison. I'm willing to believe that the networking layer was more difficult, but I really question about *how much* more difficult it was. Mike