alt Hacker NewsDoing this brings you close to OSI, which famously failed by being overcomplicated. The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.
I always wonder if the internet is thesurvivor of the networking cambrian explosion, with a slight roll of the dice making another candidate the winner.
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> The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.
Yes and no. The current internet arguably does not work without a browser and a TLS stack anyway, neither of which is easily implementable (e.g. number of practically usable rendering engines is in the single digits). I mean, I can piece together an IP packet, too, but there's not that many usable services reachable that way.
You’re definitely right — the tech stack travels through time along what’s called a “path dependent” trajectory.
As someone who was there at the time, OSI certainly didn't fail by being "overcomplicated". It failed because a) they charged money to read the standards documents and b) TCP/IP already had so much deployment momentum that nothing was going to supplant it (we see proof of this in the fact that IPv6 also didn't achieve that). Edit: also c) there was no requirement (unlike RFCs) to have an interoperable reference implementation available. So the implementations that were created mostly didn't interoperate.