> From: Steve Deering <deering(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>
> We used to use "gateway" instead of "router" (and a few still do),
> and I always thought the change to the "router" term was due to some
> sort of OSI political correctness. If not OSI, who gets credit for
> imposing the "router" jargon on the IP world? Was it the DEC folks
> (mostly Radia?)?
I don't know how much of the credit^H^H^H^Hblame belongs to me, but I was
one of the people who pushed hard for that switch in terminology.
My reasoning had nothing to do with OSI (which I disliked about as much as
a certain later alternative, to calibrate you :-), but had to do with the
fact that to the then-great-unwashed (I mean, it was the early '80's - who
knew about the Internet? :-) a "gateway" was some sort of service
translation box, e.g. to convert Novell Netware email to DECNet email, or
whatever.
I reckoned it would be easier to explain to people how this new-fangled
Internet thing worked if we didn't have to erase all the wrong ideas that
automatically paged into their brain when we said the word "gateway".
Noel