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Email could have been X.400 times better

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Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#151

Post by SllX »

projektfu wrote: post #128
wat10000 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a story once, which may well be completely made up, about why AT&T got out of the cell phone business. They had a research project, but reliability was an issue. They couldn't see a way to do better than 1 dropped call in 10,000. Their standard for POTS at the time was 1 in 2 billion. Seeing that the tech would never be good enough, they sold off the whole thing for cheap. Years later, they bought it back for w…

Seems a little sus. AT&T basically created the cellular mobile phone, and built up an analog, then digital system (D-AMPS/TDMA). AT&T sort of sold out the mobile business in 2004 to Cingular (BellSouth) because TDMA was a dead end. They then bought BellSouth back in 2006 and carried on with CDMA. Those old phones had a long range. It was hard to make small ones because the old AT&T towers were much farther apart, up…

This is a minor detail, but the "AT&T" that bought BellSouth in 2006 was the AT&T formerly known as SBC which bought the husk of Ma Bell and rebranded itself, i.e. the AT&T we have today.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#153

Post by silvestrov »

pjc50 wrote: post #25
MisterTea wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, Anyone remember the promise of ATM networking in the 90's? It was telecom grade networking which used circuit switched networking that would handle voice, video and data down one pipe. Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a…

> Ethernet had to adapt to deterministic real-time needs Without being able to get too into the telco detail, I think the lesson was that hard realtime is both much harder to achieve and not actually needed . People will happily chat over nondeterministic Zoom and Discord. It's both psychological and slightly paradoxical. Once you let go of saying "the system MUST GUARANTEE this property", you get a much cheaper, bet…

> not actually needed

What you need is more that enough bandwidth.

Think of the difference between a highway with few cars versus a highway filled to the brim with cars. In the latter case traffic slows to a crawl even for ambulances.

It seems like it was just cheaper and easier to build more bandwidth than it was to add traffic priority handling to internet connectivity.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#154

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

pjc50 wrote: post #25
MisterTea wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, Anyone remember the promise of ATM networking in the 90's? It was telecom grade networking which used circuit switched networking that would handle voice, video and data down one pipe. Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a…

> Ethernet had to adapt to deterministic real-time needs Without being able to get too into the telco detail, I think the lesson was that hard realtime is both much harder to achieve and not actually needed . People will happily chat over nondeterministic Zoom and Discord. It's both psychological and slightly paradoxical. Once you let go of saying "the system MUST GUARANTEE this property", you get a much cheaper, bet…

> People will happily chat over nondeterministic Zoom and Discord.

Well, not "happily". (Doesn't every video conference do the "hold on, can you hear me? I have wifi issues" dance every other day?) But it works on a good day.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#155

Post by teddyh »

rayiner wrote: post #86
pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

Worse is Better: https://web.archive.org/web/20040619155500/http://www.jwz.or...

Better link, by the author: https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html>

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#156

Post by grandinj »

thund wrote: post #124

wow, how to romanticize X.400 ... - poor Internet fit, assuming managed, trusted networks - some promises depended on all participating systems behaving honestly - once a message reaches another server, you cannot guarantee it isn't copied, backed up, or logged - X.400 read receipts: more reliable but also more privacy invasive - X.400 metadata: carries a lot of routing, classification, and organizational info leadin…

Yeah, as someone who had to implement a protocol stack to talk to a X.400 server, it was not fun at all. Weird encodings, monster spec, all sorts of weird server-specific stuff that you had to do exactly right if you wanted the server to accept your email.

Compared to that, when I implemented RFC821/822 (i.e. SMTP) mail, the hardest part was the weird line-encodings, but other than that, the spec was ___so___ nicely readable and pragmatic.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#157

Post by buttocks »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #91
pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

> In the end, internet swallowed telephones and everything is now VOIP. Using ITU voice codecs!

And still, ITU modem standards and T.30 … yes, fax still lives!

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#158

Post by ajb »

pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

The rivalry continues in the fibre era, with ITU's GPON and successors competing with IEEE EPON etc. ITU does seem to have lost out comprehensively at layer 3. They do some stuff like OAM which is only interesting at Telco scale, although in the mobile era bodies like ETSI are more relevant.

The other difference from that era, and even the early internet era, is how much is no longer standardised at all, but decided by global monopolies. Back then it was a given that Everything would at least need to interoperate at the national level. But we may be returning to that .

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#159

Post by johannes1234321 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #154
pjc50 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ethernet had to adapt to deterministic real-time needs Without being able to get too into the telco detail, I think the lesson was that hard realtime is both much harder to achieve and not actually needed . People will happily chat over nondeterministic Zoom and Discord. It's both psychological and slightly paradoxical. Once you let go of saying "the system MUST GUARANTEE this property", you get a much cheaper, bet…

> People will happily chat over nondeterministic Zoom and Discord. Well, not "happily". (Doesn't every video conference do the "hold on, can you hear me? I have wifi issues" dance every other day?) But it works on a good day.

At work it became mostly flawless. Everybody is used to it and people can jump in calls quickly when chat discussion etc don't suffice. The glitches are on a comparable level to physical meetings where somebody comes late and disturbs all while getting settled or somebody speaking too quiet for the room.

In my club when there is a virtual club meeting however, where people don't have frequent video meetings there is always somebody with trouble ... often the same.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#160

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

jcranmer wrote: post #148
tosti wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean the presentation layer, hard disagree. Not thinking about presentation creates problems. For example, Go treating ASCII headers as UTF-8 caused trouble. Only slightly not worrying about an HTTP/2 vs HTTP/1.1 mismatch caused trouble for reverse proxies. Now I'm young enough not to have seen teletypes in an actual production use setting, but I've never heard anyone suggesting the presentation layer was for…

No, it was the session layer.

TLS is our session layer.
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