[ih] DNS History

[John Day]

>
>X.500 was a user name registration scheme, originally designed to 
>lookup users, especially for email. It started with the premise 
>that, done in scale, a human name is not unique so that other

Actually, it wasn't.

>attributes would be needed to distinguish the target user.  Since if 
>flowed from X.400, the concept of a simple, global, unique email 
>address was already a lost cause.  (Your global address was

Actually it didn't flow from X.400, it was just the same people.  The 
plan to a directory was in place from early on.

>relative to your provider, which led to some interesting business 
>cards, for folks who had multiple providers.)

But then since you were in all those meetings that reviewed their 
work, you knew all of that didn't you?

>
>In its earliest discussions, the function description was strikingly 
>similar to what we built for MCI Mail, so that
>
>    crocker, brandenburg, california
>
>might produce my address.  (My first participation in the X.500 
>discussions was shortly after we had MCI Mail running, so I was able 
>to confirm the utility of this basic model, though not the later 
>technical design for achieving it in scale.  MCI Mail was a closed 
>system.)
>
>But note that the data base that X.500 used was for actively 
>registered email users, not passively available (rather than listed) 
>documents.  This was meant to be more like a White Pages than a more 
>general searching service, even as constrained as a Yellow Pages. 
>(But yes, goals expanded.)

Not really.

>
>Besides having a search function, X.500 differed from the goals of 
>the DNS by being finer-grained, targeting personal addresses, rather 
>than host addresses.

That is because by 1983, OSI had realized that naming hosts was 
irrelevant to communication. A crutch the Intenet still seems to have 
trouble getting past.

>The differences between document publishing, personnel registration, 
>name lookup and name (or, more generally, attribute) searching each 
>warrant distinction from the other.

Not as much as you might think.

Take care,
John

>d/
>--
>
>   Dave Crocker
>   Brandenburg InternetWorking
>   bbiw.net