meese@kremvax.arpa (04/01/88)
WASHINGTON -- In a simultaneous announcement that took the computer industry by surprise, OSI leaders today said that they were abandoning their effort to promote the OSI Protocol Suite in favor of the existing US Department of Defense (DoD) ARPANET Protocol Suite. The official reason cited for the decison was a new report from the Office of Technology Assessment stating that the manpower required to fully implement and test even the few OSI protocols that are now defined would consume the entire output of American university computer science programs for the rest of the century, and that printing and distributing the necessary protocol specifications would consume the entire American and Canadian paper supplies for the next five years. However, one high-placed source speaking on condition of anonymity said, ``The whole OSI thing was a practical joke one of the guys cooked up a few years ago. Nobody ever expected anybody to take it seriously. I mean, who would believe an organization supposedly dedicated to tearing down barriers to free and open communications between computers when it's run by a former director of the National Security Agency? I guess computer people are a lot more gullible than we thought. We kept dropping hints, making the whole thing more and more ridiculous. We hoped that people would eventually catch on, but it didn't work. Finally, our consciences got to us.'' In related news, officials at the Mitre Corporation in Bedford, Massachussetts reported that one of their employees, as yet publicly unidentified, froze ``as solid as stone'' when he heard the announcement. Medical experts have as yet been unable to communicate with the victim or get him to relax his facial muscles, which are reportedly locked into what was described as an ``enormous grin''. AP-NR-04-01-88 0001EST