OSI abandoned!

[me...@kremvax.arpa]

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