🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3043@ucl-cs.uucp> J.Crowcroft@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Jon Crowcroft) writes:
>
>hmm - with various announcements like ERNET in india, i suspect you
>are gonna see another order of logarithimic growth injected into
>internet protocols

   Provokes me to butt in .. :-) 

   ERNET (like JANET) used to swear by OSI !!

   But, ERNET has not contributed a fraction of as much impact it could
   have on the IP address space ! I sincerely wish it did tho'. :-) We
could have been the *big* necessity to mother inventions for solutions
to the IP fill up problem ... tho' I'm not sure if we still cant !
(Back when I was around in the team starting up the activity, I had
thought that the demand for more IP than just one class B would happen
real soon ... but it does not seem to have yet, that was over 2 years
ago!.)

    This being a thread on OSI and public spending (wasn't it, come on
now ! :-) ERNET is as good an example as JNT. And has gone a similar way
too. There a lot of IP going on there now, contact with the IP
community in the US is only going to see that overshadow (in real
impact terms) any OSI/X.400 activity there.

    In all fairness, however, some very serious efforts are on there
to bring X.400 as the E-mail backbone (tho' there are camps on either
side of the fence). IMHO, this effort is still an "experimental/engg"
one as opposed to "operational" in functioning.  Perhaps, someone
from ERNET can correct me if I am wrong.

    This is in some sense in line with my pet prediction. That OSI
as a major force in general networking will perhaps not happen, but
X.400 as an application would surely climb high, and that market I'm
sure is growing leaps and bounds in the commercial circles.

>the Internet trick to have free specs
>was to distribute the cost of specs and implemntations throughout all
>itnerested parties - > 

  Some of the cost is artificial, due to restricted information
flows and protected territories. Less synergy. It is sometimes
a win-win situation ...and it takes a long time for most 
"prefessional bodies" and "govts" .. read carreer technocrats
to realise this. 

  So Internet did not just only spread the cost, it also lowered the
real cost by focussing lots of synergsitic attention from several
hackers, labs and research work.

-- shrikumar ( shri@iucaa.ernet.in , shri@legato.cs.umass.edu )