But it did successfully mitigate, if not kill, the threat of having Sun's XDR (eXternal Data Representation) become the defacto way of describing complex data structures. The arguments that ASN used in the RPC standards wars were "no need to bundle both a description and the data", "new stuff could be added without changing clients", and "all systems (little endian and big endian) have similar data conversion costs."

It was a really annoying war (I suspect there isn't any other kind although some people apparently really enjoy the standards 'game').

My favorite quote from Bob Lyon at the time, "Try to solve the problem, not the future."