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From: PADLIPSKY@A.ISI.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: "FTAM" Implications
Message-ID: <8612250253.AA16209@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Wed, 24-Dec-86 15:25:13 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8612250253.AA16209
Posted: Wed Dec 24 15:25:13 1986
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Depending on just what he meant by it, there are some potentially
intriguing implications lurking in Marshall Rose's statement
the other day that the "FTAM" Draft International Standard doesn't
even use "the same underlying services" as its (presumed)
predecessor Draft Proposal did.  This should be clarified, since if
it turns out to mean either that the principles of Layering
have suddenly been altered (after all, if they were both at/for
the same L, one wouldn't think the underlying services _could_
differ, by definition--unless the trick is that they decided to
go to/from "connectionless"), or that the DP was somehow aimed
at/for the "wrong" L originally, it really ought to cost ISO a
fair amount of credibility.  Maybe Marshall was just speaking more
casually than I'd assumed he was, though.  Whatever the explanation,
I think we should all get to hear it.

On a probably less significant plane, I also wonder, not having
noticed an expansion of "FTAM" anywhere in the message, whether the
"AM" means "Access Method."  (The "FT" is presumably clear from
context.)  If so, is this literally or merely figuratively in the
IBM "OS" (and successors) sense of the term?  If literally, is
the problem with the DIS and the DP perhaps that Access Methods
don't really correspond cleanly to Layers and it was a change of
the arbitrary designation from (I'd imagine, but not bet) 7 to 6
that altered the "underlying services"?
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