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<div>The distinction that is being made here seems to be the one I was
pointing out:</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>What we thought was needed was purely something that mapped
Application names to network addresses. DNS is not quite that.
Grapevine was that.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>X.500 went way beyond that to try to include everything you might
want to look up. Actually, one might think of X.500 as Google
without the web! ;-) So X.500 was far too much to
effectively do the simple job that was necessary. Much of this
going overboard did come from the IFIP work that was going on.
This was the group who thought that defining the syntax of a protocol
was a formal description of the protocol. When you tried to
explain to them there were actions or procedures that had to be
defined to be a protoocl specification, they looked at you like you
were from Mars.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Take care,</div>
<div>John</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>At 18:16 +0000 2011/02/17, Eric Gade wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 5:47 PM, Craig
Partridge <<a
href="mailto:craig@aland.bbn.com">craig@aland.bbn.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote><font color="#888888">Then in January 1986, when the
central question of finalizing DNS TLDs<br>
was decided, it was explicitly decided to structure .US to make it<br>
completely useless for X.500 migration. </font><br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>This is really fascinating
stuff.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>There is little documentation on Postel's
perspective on such matters, aside from anecdotes and what's in
public, because his archives at USC are off-limits (though they have
been sorted) until an 'appropriate' amount of time has
passed.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Still I managed to find interesting
things in the NIC collection. One is a paper that Postel
co-authored with Mockapetris for a conference and presented in April
1985. Using IFIP and DNS propositions as examples, they go on to list
the differences between "Tree Systems" and "Attribute
Systems." Here is the section that interests me the most:<br>
<blockquote>
<blockquote><i>One solution would be to layer an attribute system on
top of a self-sufficient tree system...</i><br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>I assumed that this was -- at the very
least -- a concession made to the OSI community, or that it was a way
to somehow justify (though how necessary would justification be?) the
DNS being developed.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>I think there may be a case for saying
that the inclusion of ccTLDs in the first place was inspired
-- at least in part -- by OSI advocates precisely because that's the
type of organization they wanted at the top. The fact that the codes
were pulled from an ISO list might not be mere coincidence either,
though I'm going out on a limb with that.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>In terms of actual organizations and
authorities, that's an interesting case too. A lot of the
correspondence seems to indicate not only that the NIC didn't want the
job of TLD registration and administration, but that there were
expectations that international organizations would take these over,
and suggestions included such orgs as ANSI (side note: when ANSI
started registering OSI names in 1988 or 89, it was charging a
whopping $1k per name. NIC was still doing this for free I think, but
meeting notes show that early projections of pricing were around
$70).</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>--</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Eric</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
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