[ih] .UK vs .GB

Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond ocl at gih.com
Sun Apr 15 13:44:46 PDT 2018


Dear Vint,

the dates are indeed similar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols

They were indeed contemporary. And when I used them on DEC VAX, the
address was something of the like: CBS%UK.AC.KCL.CC.ELM::ZDEE699  --
which would be ZDEE699 at UK.AC.KCL.CC.ELM
(my then email address :-) )
To send to an Internet address: (you for example)
CBS%UK.AC.NSFNET-RELAY::us.va.reston.cnri::vcerf

Sending to an X.400, one had to start with:
CBS%UK.AC.MHS-RELAY::
with the rest in quotes. Often the parser in the return made an absolute
mess with X.400 sourced emails.

Also, note that CBS also accepted bang! paths, but the difference
between the % and @ delimiters in specifically routed emails for
example, vcerf%cnri.reston.va.us at nsfnet-relay.ac.uk didn't exist, thus
it was :: all the way.

Kindest regards,

Olivier

ps. the "transition" came when one ran TCP-IP over X.25.

On 15/04/2018 21:03, Vint Cerf wrote:
> does anyone on the list recall the rough dates for the "Colored Book
> Protocol" ? Seems possible that these were at least contemporary with
> DNS and UCL was confronted with the need to translate between those
> and the ARPANET and/or Internet protocols of the time.
>
> v
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 15, 2018 at 11:47 AM, Eric Gade <eric.gade at gmail.com
> <mailto:eric.gade at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Also worth noting that in a May 1984 draft of RFC 920 (and a few
>     drafts prior to this going back to April), ISO-3166 was *not*
>     specified as a set for potential TLDs, but .UK *was* given as an
>     example. In fact, the inclusion of UK was used by many
>     participants discussing the draft to argue in favor of both a
>     country-based set of TLDs and a more generic set (note that these
>     early drafts used .PUB and .COR instead of .COM and .ORG). It was
>     sometime between May and July that the ISO list was proposed as
>     the ccTLD set.
>
>     On Sun, Apr 15, 2018 at 11:02 AM, John Klensin <jklensin at gmail.com
>     <mailto:jklensin at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>         Yes, Nigel, I should (for several reasons) have remembered that
>         comment in RFC 920, but my recollection is still consistent
>         with that
>         document and your list.  That timeline list is, IMO, extremely
>         useful
>         and far more accessible (and, IIR, comprehensive) that the Park
>         dissertation.
>
>            john
>
>
>         On Sun, Apr 15, 2018 at 10:20 AM, Nigel Roberts
>         <nigel at channelisles.net <mailto:nigel at channelisles.net>> wrote:
>         > Far be it from me to be seen to clarify John's first hand
>         knowledge of
>         > RFC 1591, but it's worth pointing out that the decision to use
>         > ISO-3166-1 was not first documented in RFC 1591, but already
>         in RFC 920
>         > (October 1984) as follows
>         >
>         >> Countries
>         >>
>         >> The English two letter code (alpha-2) identifying a country
>         according the the ISO Standard for "Codes for the
>         Representation of Names of Countries" [5].
>         >>
>         >> As yet no country domains have been established.  As they
>         are established information about the administrators and
>         agents will be made public, and will be listed in subsequent
>         editions of this memo."
>         >>
>         >
>         > Stephen Deerhake and I put together an (as yet unfinished)
>         hyperlinked
>         > timeline of the DNS quite recently. Even though there are
>         some places
>         > where the editing is still a little rough, I think there is
>         some useful
>         > stuff which is not easily accessible otherwise.
>         >
>         > You can find it at http://timeline.as
>         >
>         > It does need a little work, and we need to move it from
>         using TikiWiki
>         > (which seemed like a good idea at the time) to something
>         faster, but
>         > there are some interesting things there...
>         >
>         >
>         >
>         >
>         > On 04/15/2018 02:13 PM, John Klensin wrote:
>         >>> The only explanation I got orally was that "GB stands for
>         Great Britain, while UK stands for United Kingdom of Great
>         Britain and the Northern Ireland".
>         >>>
>         >>> That was enough for me. Don't even remember who explained
>         it, but it was around the famous entry of .CS into the root
>         zone that created the "interesting" situation with
>         CS.BERKELEY.EDU <http://CS.BERKELEY.EDU> (and others) and
>         massive weird extra hacking in sendmail.cf
>         <http://sendmail.cf> due to the Janet "reverse" order of
>         labels in a domain name.
>         >>
>         >> Let me try an even less complicated one, based on what I
>         was told when
>         >> we were evaluating what became the decision to use ISO 3166
>         alpha-2
>         >> codes:   The country code system started because of a
>         request from the
>         >> UK to be able to manage their own DNS hierarchy rather than
>         depending
>         >> on a US-based organization to manage the TLD.  The ccTLDs
>         are US and
>         >> UK were decided upon (and possibly delegated) before other
>         >> administrative decisions about ccTLDs were made and "UK"
>         was what they
>         >> asked for.
>         >>
>         >> FWIW: (1) While RFC 1591 was not published until 1994, it,
>         for the
>         >> most part, described thinking and procedures that had had
>         been in
>         >> place for years rather than anything of significant that
>         was novel.
>         >> (2) YJ Park, whom some of you may know, tried to sort
>         though all of
>         >> these issues and history while working on her
>         dissertation.  The
>         >> search for answers to questions of this type might
>         reasonably start
>         >> with her and that dissertation.  That should lead to some
>         context and
>         >> references even where she does not have exact answers.
>         >>
>         >>      john
>         >>
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>
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-- 
Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond, PhD
http://www.gih.com/ocl.html

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