Biography: David M. Piscitello,
IETF OSI Area Co-director)
I received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Mathematics from Villanova University in 1974, with a strong minor in Philosophy. Disenchanted with real analysis and metricspace, I decided to pursue graduate work in Philosophy. Requiring significant dollars to attend graduate school, I accepted a programming position with Burroughs and assembly/micro-coded my way through two semesters of graduate work at Villanova. Eventually, I realized that teaching existentialism was not the sort of vocation to pay significant mortgage (this was, after all, the Carter era, and interest rates were then nearly 15%). So I remained with Burroughs, and built compilers.
Fortunately, I discovered data communications, then of the remote job entry/turnkey form--not quite existentialism, but close. Somehow, as a result of agreeing to work on a proprietary HDLC (well, IBM had SDLC, so, Burroughs felt it had to have BDLC), I became involved with transport and networking protocols for something called Open Systems Interconnection. Boning up on available literature -- at the time, I recall there was some relatively obscure protocol suite called TCP/IP, and something from Xerox, and even something from Burroughs that seemed to look a lot like that TCP/IP thing -- I became pretty excited about helping to develop something international and new. I eventually transferred within Burroughs to an architecture group, and became immersed in network layer protocols for OSI and Burroughs Network Architecture. I began attending ANSI and ISO meetings on OSI NL protocols; Dave Oran (DEC), Lyman Chapin (then at Data General, and Ross Callon (then at BBN) and I met one day in a conference room at a DEC location and dreamed up ISO 8473 (ISO IP, ISO CLNP); somehow, it became my problem, along with virtually everything in the OSI stack that was datagram or "connectionless", so for several years, I slugged it out with the X.25 community to see that datagrams and internetworking would have international acceptance. Of course, I was not alone, Dave O., Lyman, and first Ross, later Christine Hemrick (then at NTIA) became an OSI version of the Gang of Four in this struggle.
I received my first exposure to the IETF in Boston in the mid-eighties, when both an IETF and an ANSI meeting was held at BBN, and we shared some insights into routing. At the time, I was a proponent of distance vector routing, in particular a routing protocol called BIAS (Burroughs Interactive Adaptive routing System, go figure how anyone can leave the "R" out of an acronym for a routing protocol!); later, along with Jeff Rosenberg and Steve Gruchevsky of Burroughs (by this time, we were Unisys), I was to introduce BIAS as a candidate for OSI IS-IS routing in what I've called the "late, great, OSI Routing debate". Radia Perlman and Dave Oran introduced what eventually became OSI IS-IS, a link-state/SPF routing system. The routing debate was probably the highlight of my standards participation, even being on the losing side, since each meeting was filled with good discussions and challenging technical issues.
Eight years in OSI, nearly all in an uphill struggly, took its toll. I began to resent wading through the obligatory political purgatory associated with each incremental change in OSI, and eventually left in frustration. I also left Unisys at approximately the same time, also in frustration, to take on what seemed to be yet another Quijotian task -- help Christine Hemrick at Bellcore bring high speed datagram services into public networks, in the form of SMDS.
Since 1988, I've been associated with SMDS at Bellcore, and have participated in several aspects of its design, the most rewarding of which was the design of an SNMP agent for SMDS.
I'd become sort of a chaotic neutral in the OSI vs. TCP/IP debate, and remain so. I think both technologies have much to offer. TCP/IP has a better standards development infrastructure, and I accepted the position as OSI integration area director along with Erik Huizer because I believed I could do more for OSI deployment within the Internet infrastructure than elswhere. This has been rewarding and frustrating. The rewards have come from meeting and working with some truly bright and energetic people who actually care about the implementation and deployment of OSI applications and transport stacks; the frustration comes from having to deal with the IP-supremist and near racist attitude that frequently arises against OSI in the Internet.
Oh, well, yet another Quijotian task. I suspect you'll have gathered by now that I don't run from a good fight.
Dave's "Middle Ages"
In 1992, at the tender age of 40(?), I grew restless. Tired from 5 years of teleworking, and unlikely to be promoted (full time) from my position as a member of technical staff, in part due to teleworking, I decided to write a book, and engaged my close friend Lyman. Together, we produced what was at the time a relevant and well-received book that provided as even handed comparative analysis of OSI and TCP/IP as I believe could have been written. It sold well enough, especially internationally, and was even translated into Japanese. You can't really appreciate how difficult this translation must have been for the translators, because Lyman is notorious for having a writing style suitable for consumption by PhD's, and I wrote dozens of humorous and hopefully insightful anecdotes and barbs in, well, a vernacular that probably didn't translate well at all. The evidence is present throughout the book, as translators often surrendered and simply copied many english/american words into the Japanese version and left their traslations as exercises to the undoubtedly perplexed Japanese readers.
Shortly after Open Systems Interconnection was published, the small wind left in OSI's sails petered out. The U.S. government made a correct choice to yield to the power of the installed base of IP, which at this time was nurturing a remarkable new application, the World Wide Web. It's quite remarkable to me that at the time we published OSN in 1993, there were fewer than 700 web sites worldwide. Publishing OSN didn't make me wealthy or world-famous, but it did give me confidence and (ahem) credentials to start a consulting business, Core Competence. My early consulting focused on broadband, routing, and IP Next Generation. For several years, I worked almost exclusively for a short list of large clients: Cisco, Nortel, British Telecom, NIST, and MCI. Of these, the consulting time most cherished and best invested were at MCI, where I had the pleasure of working with Vint Cerf, David Clarke, and Peter Ford on MCI's global IP network. We spent considerable time investigating early Virtual Private Networking techniques, and it was through this back door that I became more involved with Internet Security than broadband access and routing. During this time, I also (finally!) had time to learn more about product than theory and standards. Through a variety of projects, including ISDN equipment certification, security product reviews for trade magazines, and independent testing and evaluation, I was able to generate revenue and grow peer recognition. Remarkable what a zeal for writing and a talent for breaking things can lead to...
Through the uniquely talented Dan Lynch, to whom I'm indebted for many opportunities and invaluable e-introductions, I became involved in first one technical advisory board (Covad Communications), and then, during the dotcom boom, several others (CoSine Communications, Aventail, Villa Montage, and recently IntruVert, Foundstone, CoRadiant and WatchGuard Technologies). These relationships have been rewarding in many ways, as I've been able to work on "bleeding edge" technologies with incredibly talented people in a variety of ways.
With the kind of network of individuals I've come into contact, I've also been successful in developing program content for over 20 years for industry conferences, especially Networld+Interop, and an Internet Security Conference (TISC) that I founded six years ago. This work has been rewarding, and gives me the freedom to continue to act as a technology gadfly.
I'm presently investigating spyware, IDS/DDOS, IPsec VPNs, Firewalls, application protection, web security, IdM, endpoint security, WLANs, and Internet Law. I'm especially curious about privacy issues, how e-evidence is gathered and preserved, and network forensics. I began a "content blog" in 2003, and as its popularity grew, I complemented the blog with numerous resource pages for Window$, firewalls, spyware, viruses, phishing and more. My web stats show I receive almost 20,000 hits per month, with enough Google Adsense revenue to pay for my DSL connection
My personal life is enriched by my wonderful wife - we'll celebrate our 20th anniversary this August! - my son, who is everything a father could hope a son would be, my princess daughter, who is smart and sassy, and my dog, Jimmie. OK, I confess to liking the cat, Cookie, too.
Updated April 16, 2005
Dave's "Latter Years"
I'm not quite there yet. I have recently shaved my beard because it's just toooo gray now. Don't push me any faster towards old age than my Internet-time industry already does!