>"William Gragido" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote,
>IS-IS is most definetly still alive and kicking. The US military utilizes
>it, and it works very well. OSPF is a different animal, and Rik, I would
>disagree with your statement as to its scalability. IS-IS was designed to
>provide complete non-vendor dependent integration at the request of the US
>Government(ie Military), to accomadate its World Wide network.
I wouldn't say US government requirements drove IS-IS. In fact, I'd
argue to the contrary.
The direct ancestor of IS-IS is DECnet Phase IV routing, principally
designed by Radia Perlman. DEC contributed its work to ISO, and
IS-IS was initially developed as a pure OSI routing protocol (i.e.,
for CLNP). IS-IS became the native IGP for DECnet Phase V, which was
OSI (protocol, not just model) at its lower layers. This was at a
time when many European governments, and their PTT's that dominated
international standards, were very anti-IP. I am _not_ making it up
when I quote, from my experience in OSI standards committee, European
PTT people saying they would not accept a protocol suite "designed by
the bomb-crazed American military."
In 1986-1988, the US government issued the Government OSI Profile
(GOSIP), which mandated OSI protocols for future government use.
Integrated IS-IS, in part, was intended as an interim protocol to use
while people migrated from proprietary and IP protocols to OSI.
Of course, market forces drove the world to the IP protocol suite. I
hate to say IP won the war over OSI; it's more that the two
intermarried. The good protocol things in OSI have wound up in IP,
and the bad things are mostly forgotten.
Integrated IS-IS was implemented in Alternet, Sprint, etc., partially
because the CLNP vs. IP debate was still a very open issue at the
time those networks were implemented.
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