[ih] NIC 7104 (ARPANET Protocol Handbook)

[Mike Padlipsky]

At 06:07 AM 4/28/2006, Craig Partridge wrote:
>If you read Wayne Hathaway's note of 10 February 1978 from HEADER-PEOPLE
>     (appended), it is clear that most folks did not expect to log into
>     (via USER) before delivering email.  [...]

that's not at all clear to me, based on the copy you 
enclosed.  unless there's something to make you draw that inference 
in the context of whatever it was brian the beautiful had said that 
elicited wayne's response, it looks to me as if wayne didn't even 
believe in netmail because it wasn't in what he thought the official 
protocol was.

>Sounds like the Multicians
>     expected it.

indeed.  see rfc 491 [and 501, 505].

>So how did mailers handle this? Did they try MLFL and
>     when it bounced with a 5xx message say, "oh $%!, its a Multics
>     machine?" and try a USER ANONYMOUS command.  Or did they do something
>     smarter,

to the best of my knowledge and belief, they used the rfc 491 
convention -- even the tenexes, after the version of their 
mail-sending command that a friend of mine who ran an non-bbn tenex 
site did at my request got propagated through the tenex jungle somehow.

>or did Multics just not get all the mail coming to it?

since the whole rfc 491 fuss was triggered by larry roberts's having 
decreed that p.i.'s would only be able to communicate with him via 
netmail after a given date [which of course escapes me], as far as i 
know things did work out the way they were supposed to.

that being said, let's go back to your initial message that set this 
chain off, where you said

>(It appears that the final
>standard for email over FTP never appeared as an RFC but appeared
>in the protocol handbook!).

having been compelled by vestigial curiosity to do more 'scholarship' 
than i ever intended to do again, i suggest it wasn't quite right 
to've taken wayne's word for it about there being no spec until the 
rather flawed protocol handbook thingie.  the mlfl and mail commands 
were in rfc 385, a followup to rfc 354, and in rfc 454; they were 
also discussed in rfc's 487,491, 501, and 505, among others, and were 
of course in widespread use before and after rfc 542.  however, 
although i hadn't realized it until a very few minutes ago, somehow 
they weren't in rfc 542.   i believe that must have been an accident, 
since rfc 640 [by jon on the transcription i just looked at of on the 
first page, and by jon and nancy neigus, who was the primary author 
of 542, as well as ken pogran, on the second page] does specify 
revised ftp reply codes for them.

i cannot account for my failure to have noticed the omission when 542 
came out, nor for nancy's having omitted them [although i suppose 
it's remotely possible she did it on purpose, to bug me -- make that 
very remotely; i seem to recall we were on fairly good terms with one 
another].  that jon didn't indicate their having been unintentionally 
left out of the 542 spec in NIC 29588 is, i take it, further evidence 
that he had an uncharacteristically bad day when he wrote it.

finally, as to

>If you read the NIC document, it appears that the ARPANET was a messy
>     place [...]

i don't have to have read the nic document to know that the 'net was 
messy, having lived through it.


cheers, map

[whose shoulder problems caused him to break down some time ago and 
create a 'signature' file to apologize for the lack of his formerly 
customary e-volubility -- and who's been employing shiftless typing 
for a long time now to spare his wristsnfingers, in case you didn't 
know ... and who's further broken down and done 
http://www.lafn.org/~ba213/mapstuff.html , rather grudgingly]