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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

#201

Post by pseudohadamard »

mixdup wrote: post #172
pseudohadamard wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was designed by people who were trying to digitally emulate 1920s copper-wire circuits at a time when the entire world was moving to packet-switched digital data. I remember visiting a large telco at the time and having to tell them about this new thing called ADSL that was going to steamroller them if they weren't careful. "Nooo... no, that's not real, you can't do that over a phone line, not possible. And even i…

The ironic thing is many telephone companies ended up using ATM to serve ADSL. My childhood home in rural Alabama still only has one terrestrial internet option and that is a 6 megabit ADSL line from AT&T (originally Bellsouth) served out of a remote terminal that is fed by an ATM circuit from the Central Office. My brother lives in that house and is prepared any day to finally get a notice from AT&T that they're dis…

Yup, they did that here too. You had to set up all sorts of ATM parameters when you configured an ADSL router, VPI, VCI, and others. However I no longer have access to that information since I used alcohol to sterilise the affected parts of my mind.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#202

Post by cylemons »

wat10000 wrote: post #122
packetlost wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, are you serious? This is how it works?

This is how old-school TCP figures out how fast it can send data, regardless of the underlying transport. It ramps up the speed until it starts seeing packet loss, then backs off. It will try increasing speed again after a bit, in case there's now more capacity, and back off again if there's loss.

TCP still works this way?

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#203

Post by cylemons »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #104
agwa wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll note that while X.509 certificates are deployed widely on the Internet, they are not deployed in the manner the ITU intended. There is no global X.500 directory and Distinguished Names are just opaque identifiers that are used to help find issuers during chain building. That hardly counts as a win for the ITU in my book.

And in some usages CN is just doesn't even looked up upon.

Apperantly the AKID and SKID extensions are used instead these days

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#204

Post by Tor3 »

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.

Well, Teams is like that (not "I have wifi issues", but "I have Teams issues"). Even more so after teams.microsoft.com moved to teams.cloud.microsoft - never got the mic or speaker to work after that. Before, it was kind of random.

Zoom, on the other hand.. I have weekly Zoom meetings and never had do to the "can you hear me" thing. Or in fact with basically anything which is not Teams.

In any case.. it's not the network, it's the application/service.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#205

Post by Tor3 »

ogurechny wrote: post #68

An article from Microsoft Systems Journal in 1993 ends with a bunch of different electronic mail addresses: https://jacobfilipp.com/MSJ/1993-vol8/qawindows.pdf By 1995, the “Internet” e-mail address was the only remaining one.

I used to have a book laying around - it had, or tried to have, all the email addresses in my country. Like a phonebook for email addresses. That approach didn't last long.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#206

Post by pimlottc »

mixdup wrote: post #173
pimlottc wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My college went all-in on ATM-over-fiber and wired all the dorm rooms with it. It was a PITA. Of course no computers came with ATM support and the cards cost $400+ each so the school had hundreds of cards that they would “lease” them out to students each year. There would be a huge “install depot” at the start of the year where students brought in their (desktop) computers and volunteers would open them up, install t…

Wait, they did ATM to the desktop ? What year was that? I could see a college/university network department dominated by old school telecom guys deciding to use ATM to connect buildings, but it's kind of insane to think anyone at any point in time thought it was reasonable to push to individual endpoints

Yep. This was in the mid-nineties. The fiber was already present from the initial effort to wire the campus starting in 1998 [0]. The move to ATM happened later and was in used for 6-7 years before they went to gigabit ethernet [1] (check the comments for more info on the ATM years).

0: https://www.networkworld.com/article/899168/lan-wan-universi...

1: https://science.slashdot.org/story/04/06/02/0038223/fiber-to...

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#207

Post by dbbk »

addaon wrote: post #99

I still think the missing opportunity with e-mail was for the USPS (back in the US-dominant internet days) to take a leading role and implement "e-stamps." Provide a subscription service that managed a per-user account, cost a 1¢ stamp to send a message, and guaranteed delivery of messages received with a 1¢ stamp on them -- with the received stamp value being put in the user's account, so a user who received more ma…

what on earth are you on about

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#208

Post by dbbk »

jerjerjer wrote: post #36

> If the history of email had gone somewhat differently, the last email you sent could have been rescinded or superseded by a newer version when you accidentally wrote the wrong thing. It could have auto-destructed if not read by midnight. Immutability is one of the best things about email.

Boy do I have news for you https://amp.dev/about/email

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#209

Post by pimlottc »

pimlottc wrote: post #206
mixdup wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, they did ATM to the desktop ? What year was that? I could see a college/university network department dominated by old school telecom guys deciding to use ATM to connect buildings, but it's kind of insane to think anyone at any point in time thought it was reasonable to push to individual endpoints

Yep. This was in the mid-nineties. The fiber was already present from the initial effort to wire the campus starting in 1998 [0]. The move to ATM happened later and was in used for 6-7 years before they went to gigabit ethernet [1] (check the comments for more info on the ATM years). 0: https://www.networkworld.com/article/899168/lan-wan-universi... 1: https://science.slashdot.org/story/04/06/02/0038223/fiber-to...

Oops, I meant the fiber was laid starting in 1988

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#210

Post by xorcist »

somat wrote: post #117
philipstorry wrote: post #22

SMTP won because it was simpler, but it's probably good to look at why it was simpler. SMTP handled routing by piggybacking on DNS. When an email arrives the SMTP server looks at the domain part of the address, does a query, and then attempts transfer it to the results of that query. Very simple. And, it turns out, immensely scalable. You don't need to maintain any routing information unless you're overriding DNS for…

Ehhh.. This is a bit revisionist for a couple reasons. 1. smtp predates dns. or really even most of the internet. It was originally designed to work over uucp. 2. early smtp used bang paths (remember those) where the route or partial route is baked into the path.

A bit, perhaps, but not much.

At the time of bang paths, smtpd was just one of several email protocols in use. And X.400 was absolutely a competitor at the time.

A decade or two later, when it was clear that smtp had become the least common denominator between all email systems, then smtp absolutely used DNS and even had its own record type, MX.

So I don't think it is wrong to say a large part of why it won out on all other protocols was that you didn't have to mess with email routing once MX records was universally accepted.

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