VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Paul Koning]

> On Jul 15, 2016, at 7:34 PM, Alexander Schreiber <als at thangorodrim.ch> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 10:08:40AM -0400, Mouse wrote:
>>> ...
> 
> IP won over OSI *hualp* and whatever else insanity was out there because
> it a) works, b) is reasonably simply to implement (yes, I know, a full up,
> modern TCP/IP stack is anything but trivial, but the basics are not that
> crazy) and comes with a rather low level of designed-in complexity.
> Just compare SMTP and the OSI equivalent, X.400 ... yikes.

True, OSI application layer protocols tended to be elephants.  But one should not confuse those with the lower layers.  You can run X.400 on top of TCP or DECnet NSP (DEC did exactly the latter, in a commercially successful product despised by the engineers using the internal network), and similarly you can perfectly well run non-OSI applications on top of TP4.  For example, it would be trivial to run http, or iscsi, over DECnet.  It hasn't been done as far as I know, but technically it would be a no-brainer.  In fact, a lot of application protocols (iscsi for example) are easier on DECnet because NSP (and TP4) have packet boundaries while TCP does not (though SCTP does).

	paul