from the other side of the atlantic ...

The ISO thinking in 1978 was in the world of preplanned communication with transaction between companies who are sending purchase orders back and forth, sending shipment information. Modeled, largely, now I think of it, on the mindset that came out of the manufacturing systems that built IDS and built MIACS₁. How do we essentially have corporations cooperate with other corporations doing their business? The EDI90 stuff about how to do communication between businesses is what they mainly focused on. Some say the ISO/SC16 specifications didn’t work well for email. If it had worked well, it would be a happy accident. I don’t think the goal was to make email...I don’t think it was even conceived that email would be important or that browsing would be important.

... part of the vision, certainly in my mind, is that a great deal of what open system interconnections dealing with was messages being sent between programs. The Internet was largely people to people communication. I think that the underlying thought process in the OSI was this was computer process to computer process communication, or people to computer process, so that it had a different requirement on how to behave. | charles w. bachman, once chair of the iso/osi committee

snippets from a long and intense 166pages-interview by thomas haigh for sigmod, babbage institute.

₁ MIACS, an early transaction processing system, was built around Bachman’s new creation: the IDS (Integrated Data Store). IDS is called the first database management system | haigh.

i guess "metcalff" is just a typo, and should mean bob metcalfe, the guy whom harvard told: your dissertation about the arpanet is "not theoretical enough." | metcalfe rfc89 (text/plain, 17 KB)

...the routing problem can be formulated as follows. Given a network of stations, connected by links with specified capacities, and given the message demands imposed, find the message routes that allow the largest possible number of messages to be delivered.

As examples of large networks, the Western Union network has fifteen regional switching stations; and the new U. S. Defense Communications System has more than 100 major stations...the single precision codes developed for the IBM 7090 at the Electronic Computation Center, Standard Oil Company of California, San Francisco ... | jacm 11, No. 1 (January, 1964}, pp. 104-I 16, maurice pollack

Symposium on "Optimum Routing in Large Networks" of the IFIP Congress 62 (organized by the Council of the International Federation for Information Processing); held at Munich, Germany, August 27-September 1, 1962.
Investigation was supported in part by Army Communication Systems Division, U.S. Army Signal Corps, under contract iDA 36-039-SC-85052.