From here
I think a lot of it is cultural, and it’s not just in aviation. You only have to compare the European driven ISO/OSI networking system (failed) with the American TCP/IP (wild success). ISO/OSI was burdened with rigid, complex rules, and if you wanted the documentation so you could implement it, you had to pay out vast sums of money. If you wanted the RFCs for the Internet…well, you just downloaded them for free. Europe generally has a bit of a fetish for burdensome, bureaucratic and inflexible rules and it’s seen in many activities, where the US will have a much more practical and pragmatic ruleset, and the European equivalent will be more restricted and less flexible.
Unfortunately, people often make the mistake that “lots of inflexible rules” are good rulemaking, when in reality all they are is burdensome.
You only have to compare the European driven ISO/OSI networking system (failed)
Bit of a personal hot button there – I tried to make OSI work for ten years (see article below). Probably the biggest single source of complexity and failure was driven primarily by AT&T (the so-called Connection Oriented Network Service, aka X.25 on low-strength steroids), though France certainly helped them. And probably the biggest problem was just that back then, nobody really knew why they wanted computers to talk to each other in the first place. May sound incredible now, but this was 30-40 years ago.
http://n5296s.blogspot.com/2020/08/some-network-history-open-systems.html
johnh wrote:
Bit of a personal hot button there – I tried to make OSI work for ten years (see article below). Probably the biggest single source of complexity and failure was driven primarily by AT&T (the so-called Connection Oriented Network Service, aka X.25 on low-strength steroids), though France certainly helped them. And probably the biggest problem was just that back then, nobody really knew why they wanted computers to talk to each other in the first place. May sound incredible now, but this was 30-40 years ago.http://n5296s.blogspot.com/2020/08/some-network-history-open-systems.html
Very interesting! At the time I worked for the a Swedish national research institute for Computer Science (SICS). I was very slightly involved in this from the user side but some of my colleagues much more so. I remember with horror the “connection-oriented network service.” Of course the telcos loved it because they could charge for the time the connection was open even if no information was transmitted – just like they did with physical connections – although that really made no sense at all.
johnh wrote:
And probably the biggest problem was just that back then, nobody really knew why they wanted computers to talk to each other in the first place
One of the puzzle pieces of the “European Disease”: If we do not have a proof for the value, we don’t do it. The US approach is more like: Let’s do it and figure out how we use it along the way…
But there are others too – which can be very well illustrated by the early OSI times:
- X.25 might have been an “open standard” but it absolutely did not feel that way in the reality of most European countries where we had a national telco monopolist. These days it was much easier to hack into a X.25 line (called “Datex-P” in Germany") than to apply for one officially. (Just for the records: I heard that from a friend of a neighbor who had a relative …). So from all practical perspectives it was as closed standard by local monopolist as possible
- To be fair: Also the US did never really care about international standardization but just did their “local” proprietary stuff. The difference just is, that the market for such proprietary stuff is much bigger than any national European market – therefore they set de facto standards for the western world. Will be in treating to see how this works out in the future where with China there is a bigger fish in the pond.
- Finally, esp. in Germany we have the tendency to discuss theoretic standards for ages before we pragmatically bring products to the market. It simply doesn’t matter if hydrogen electric cars are 10% better than battery electric ones if the world is flooded with BEV before we have decided which direction we want to go …
Interesting account from Johnh. I was working somewhat in that field late 1980s… making IBM plug-compatible (S36/AS400 twinax and S370 coax) protocol converters, allowing cheap printers to be used. The last thing we did was an emulator for IPDS 
Europe has a tendency to involve “organisations” in everything. The result is complexity.
Well, mobile telephone technology. NMT was the first fully automatic system, the first generation (1G). A fully open standard. Then came GSM, the second generation in 1991 (2G), and the rest is history (3G, 4G, 5G, 6G … ) NMT was operational in 1981, and was made because the existing technology was getting congested at the time. One of the fore runners, OLT in Norway, was the largest mobile network in the world. NMT had free roaming from the start in 1981, at least between Nordic countries. But, I guess one could argue that mobile phones was a Nordic thing, not “European” as such The GSM (2G) can be said to be a European thing however.
The US was utterly in the dark ages (in every sense of the word) until Steve Jobs simply refused to follow the “conventions” of the big players there, and the iPhone 3G came in 2009, 28 years after NMT. That’s a human generation more or less.
Add to that discussion the French Minitel ! I was able to book flights online look up train timetables and book tickets in the early 90s when I lived in Paris. I have no idea about the tech behind it (not my field at all, which sometimes seems to make me an outlier at EuroGA 
), but it worked – and disappeared.
I am proud to have witnessed the Minitel in action when I was young
I was there
You could, I am told, find women on it too
Well, America had Compu$erve which did a similar job, but much bigger. It went back to well before my time on it (which was c. 1990), and dial-up modems go back a long way before that.
Peter wrote:
Well, America had Compu$erve which did a similar job, but much bigger.
I had my very first email address on CompuServe, ca. 1994 which came bundled with a MacBook 500 (!!) and you know what – it still works !!
To put an aviation slant on this, I found the little flying club where I learned to fly on one of the CompuServe fora.
