The Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile (GOSIP) was a specification that profiled open networking products for procurement by governments in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Timeline
* 1988 - GOSIP: Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile published by
CCTA, an agency of UK government
* 1988 - UK's CCTA commences work with France and West Germany on European Procurement Handbook (EPHOS)
* 1990 - The US specification requiring
Open Systems Interconnection
The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model is a reference model developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that "provides a common basis for the coordination of standards development for the purpose of systems inter ...
(OSI) protocols was first published as
Federal Information Processing Standards The Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) of the United States are a set of publicly announced standards that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed for use in computer systems of non-military United State ...
document FIPS 146-1. The requirement for US Government vendors to demonstrate their support for this profile led them to join the formal
interoperability
Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader de ...
and
conformance testing
Conformance testing and also known as compliance testing or type testing, is testing or other activities that determine whether a process, product, or service complies with the requirements of a specification, technical standard, contract, or reg ...
for networking products, which had been done by industry professionals at the annual InterOp show since 1980.
* 1990 - Publication of European Procurement Handbook (EPHOS), intended to be a European GOSIP
* 1991 - 4th and final version of UK GOSIP released
* 1993 - Australia and New Zealand GOSIP Version 3 - 1993 Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile
* 1995 - FIPS 146-2 allowed "...other specifications based on open, voluntary standards such as those cited in paragraph 3 ("...such as those developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)... and the International Telecommunications Union, Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU–T))"
In practice, from 1995 interest in OSI implementations declined, and worldwide the deployment of standards-based networking services since have been predominantly based on the
Internet protocol suite
The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...
.
However, the
Defense Messaging System continued to be based on the OSI protocols
X.400 and
X.500, due to their integrated security capabilities.
See also
*
OSI model
The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model is a reference model developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that "provides a common basis for the coordination of standards development for the purpose of systems inter ...
*
ISO Development Environment
The ISODE software (pronounced eye-soo-dee-eee), more formally the ''ISO Development Environment'', was an implementation of the OSI upper layer protocols, from transport layer to application layer, which was used in the Internet research communi ...
(ISODE)
*
Protocol Wars
References
{{Authority control
Computer standards