>From: Dave Crocker <dcrocker(_at_)mordor(_dot_)stanford(_dot_)edu>
>Subject: Re: DMS RFP Bids
>Date: Sat, 9 Jul 1994 13:37:55 -0700
>Periodically, there is great pressure to try to create "convergence" among
>competing technologies. My own experience says that the way things
>converge is that one side wins and the other goes away.
This is the war philosophy; its incompatible with International or
National standards making where long-term protocolar agreement (not
short-term consensus) must always be the primary aim. War gaming is the IETF
that was,
and sure it was fun. Time to move on Dave; the younger generation grew
up multi-stack, multi-protocol, and have had great research and design
fun making it all seamless, using many different layering techniques,
specializing the technology individually for the variety of commercial
uses of networking. Now we all want to deploy it massively so that we
reuse the existing materials already out there so that the public
benefit. This is the utilitarian spirit which UCL invested in me and
the rest of London's Bloomsbury crowd at the IETF, anyway; though I
recognise Bentham and Stanford could probably be not more poles apart!
Technology migration strategy requirements are particularly evident in a
miltary infrastructure. It may be another 10 (perhaps 20!) years before
someone dumps some of the older US Navy 75 baud telex machines over the
side; meantime, it has to seamlessly fit in to the messaging concept
without altering what is already there, and without undermining an
old-timer user's belief in his/her capabilities to manage technology,
and not be confounded by it, the anarchic infobog, and all other jargon.
Functional requirements for an infrastructure are not enough. (That was
what was so wrong, wrong, wrong, with the FIRP and associated "NIST" reports
recently, and what DISA complained about - to deaf, political, ears)
The gun-toting, fontier-mentality in the public and corporate
internetworking is just out-of-date. Its all just too expensive, and
too big to play politics and word-games with. Once the criticality
of a highway, and its invested capital become so important to a
nation, then perhaps it has to be take away from the gun-toting
founders - just like the US railways and Stanford! Or Carnagie
and US steel.
Try to bind, not devide-and-conquer.
----
Perhaps it time to formulate a PEM work agenda for Toronto. As usual,
I have to brief both the goers and doers. The more notice the better.
I could at least attempt to get permission to disclose the US POst
Offices plans for PEM and RSA interworking, if it seems useful, and
then find someone who's going to be present to deliver the message. The
plans are being increasingly linked into the activities of other US
government, industry and professional groups' activities in
registration and certification, in a way which might affect the
technical standards.