shuford@cs.utk.edu (Richard Shuford) (05/06/91)
Archive-name: internet/iso/iso-spec/1991-05-01 Archive-directory: cs.utk.edu:/pub/internetworking/iso_spec/ [128.169.201.1] Original-posting-by: shuford@cs.utk.edu (Richard Shuford) Original-subject: ISO/CCITT standards descriptions Reposted-by: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN) > Date: 29 Apr 91 16:13:41 EDT > From: ZK0E2003@VMHOST.NCTSW.NAVY.MIL (David Keith) > To: isode@nic.ddn.mil > Subject: ISO and CCITT > > Does anyone know where I might get a copy of the ISO and CCITT > standards? I prefer to get them online if possible. More specifically > is there somewhere on the Internet where these are maintained? Thanks > in advance for your input. Your question is a candidate for most "Frequently Asked Question" for this [mailing-list,newsgroup]. First, the bad news. Alas, there is precious little to be found online. The ISO and CCITT conduct their proceedings in a manner foreign (so to speak) to Internet convention. Authorized standards are available only as copyrighted printed documents. These are sold at a price designed to help defray the expenses of creating the standard, which is to say, at a high price. In the United States, the most convenient place to buy them is Omnicom Inc. 115 Park St. SE Vienna, VA 22180-4607 (voice) +1 703/281-1135 (fax ) +1 703/281-1505 CCITT documents are also available, I'm told, via the United Nations Bookstore. Now, the slight amelioration. Summaries of the ISO/CCITT standards can be found in books from conventional publishers. These condensed versions are not suitable if you are going to make your living selling implementations of the protocols and services, but a student of the subject can study them with some profit, and the level of detail might suffice for building a toy implementation. (I'm not deprecating the value of toys in understanding the technology, but an implementation developed without reference to the real documents is in danger of breaking when used for any vital purpose.) One such book is \OSI Explained: End-to-End Computer Communication Standards/, 2nd ed. by John Henshall and Sandy Shaw. Published by Ellis Horwood Ltd. 1990. ISBN 0-13-639451-5, TK5105.5.H47, 250 pages. You can also find some help in \The Open Book: A Practical Perspective on OSI/ by Marshall T. Rose. Prentice-Hall 1990. ISBN 0-13-643016-3, TK5105.5.R67, 652 pages. If you are accustomed to learning protocols by reading Internet RFC documents, you will find the language and terminology used in the OSI standards to be strangely formal. Sometimes the formality obviously was needed in writing documents intended for use by people whose native languages are not English; other times it looks like the formality was put in just to make the document look impressive. In this "OSIfied" language, for instance, the word "byte" is not used. The units of information that computers manipulate are called "octets". As regards online sources of information, there are a few, but they are often hard to find. The individual authors of some standards sometimes make copies of \draft/ versions of documents available in electronic form, but you often have to be a friend-of-a-friend to get these. In some cases where the technology of TCP/IP and OSI are juxtaposed, one of the Request-for-Comment series discusses the interworking of the two protocol families. Examples of these are: RFC1006: ISO Transport Services on Top of the TCP RFC 994: Protocol for Providing the Connectionless Mode Network Service RFC1148: Mapping Between X.400(1988)/ISO 10021 and RFC822 Otherwise, sometimes a researcher will take information from an ISO/CCITT document, cast it into different form, and then make this derived work available electronically. One such derivative work was constructed at the University of Twente, a description of the OSI Transport Protocol ISO 8072 in the LOTOS protocol-specification language. This particular work is available, until the next Great Disk Space Crunch, by anonymous FTP from our server "cs.utk.edu" (128.169.201.1). Look for pub/internetworking/iso_spec/kremer_lotos_1.mail pub/internetworking/iso_spec/tp_lotos.txt.Z The "tp_lotos.txt" file has been compressed in the Unix style; the compressed size is 103,177 bytes, er, octets. Set "type binary" for the file transfer and then decompress on your end. Eventually, the University of Twente plans to make this and some other documents directly available for FTP (and possibly for FTAM as well). Possibly other readers of this forum will point out additional handy sources of OSI information. [Incidently, does the news/mailing-list gateway send traffic in only one direction: FROM the Usenet newsgroup "comp.protocols.iso.dev-environ" TO the mailing list "isode@nic.ddn.mil"? I'm posting this via news, but several things I have read in the mail have not shown up in the newsgroup.....RSS] -- ....Richard S. Shuford | "Do not rebuke a mocker or he will hate you; rebuke ....shuford@cs.utk.edu | a wise man and he will love you. Instruct a wise ....BIX: richard | man and he will be wiser still." Proverbs 9:7 NIV -- comp.archives file verification cs.utk.edu total 116 -rw-r--r-- 1 359 103177 Apr 30 14:00 tp_lotos.txt.Z -rw-r--r-- 1 359 4059 Apr 30 13:59 kremer_lotos_1.mail found iso-spec ok cs.utk.edu:/pub/internetworking/iso_spec/