Bad Politics

On account of the initial implementation, many people, especially in academia, thought of TCP/IP as part of UNIX, and UNIX in the 1980s in academia was not unlike parenthood (then incorrectly called motherhood) and apple pie.

OSI, on the other hand, was widely thought to be the creature of the European telecommunication ministries, the European Community, and later the U.S. Government. This belief was only partly true, but the very idea of a bunch of government bureaucrats trying to shove a technically inferior standard down the throats of the poor researchers and programmers down in the trenches actually developing computer networks did not aid OSI’s cause.

1.5. A Critique of the TCP/IP Reference Model

The TCP/IP model and protocols have their problems too. First, the model does not clearly distinguish the concepts of services, interfaces, and protocols. Good software engineering practice requires differentiating between the specification and the implementation, something that OSI does very carefully, but TCP/IP does not. Consequently, the TCP/IP model is not much of a guide for designing new networks using new technologies.

Second, the TCP/IP model is not at all general and is poorly suited to describing any protocol stack other than TCP/IP. Trying to use the TCP/IP model to describe Bluetooth, for example, is completely impossible.

Third, the link layer is not really a layer at all in the normal sense of the term as used in the context of layered protocols. It is an interface (between the network and data link layers). The distinction between an interface and a layer is crucial, and one should not be sloppy about it.

Fourth, the TCP/IP model does not distinguish between the physical and data link layers. These are completely different. The physical layer has to do with the transmission characteristics of copper wire, fiber optics, and wireless communication. The data link layer’s job is to delimit the start and end of frames and get them from one side to the other with the desired degree of reliability. A proper model should include both as separate layers. The TCP/IP model does not do this.

Finally, although the IP and TCP protocols were carefully thought out and well implemented, many of the other protocols were ad hoc, generally produced by a couple of graduate students hacking away until they got tired. The protocol implementations were then distributed free, which resulted in their becoming widely used, deeply entrenched, and thus hard to replace. Some of them are a bit of an embarrassment now. The virtual terminal protocol, TELNET, for example, was designed for a ten-character-per-second mechanical Teletype terminal. It knows nothing of graphical user interfaces and mice. Nevertheless, it is still in use some 30 years later.