[ih] DNS History

[Dave Crocker]

On 3/8/2010 5:46 PM, John Day wrote:
>>
>> 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.

The key word was "originally".  That was the specific goal in the initial design 
sessions I attended.

Things evolve.  IPv6 started simple, too.  So did Internet Mail, the Web, etc., 
etc.  Sometimes bloat sets in during initial discussion, sometimes during 
design, sometimes after a decade of use.  It isn't inevitable.  Perhaps.


>> 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.

It came directly from needing to find email addresses.  It was not an accident 
that it was the same people.  They knew that X.400 addresses were unwieldy and 
they knew that the global scale of an email service required some way of finding 
addresses.

(Odd historical note, given your citing him:  John White wrote an early Arpanet 
NCP implementation for an IBM 360, at UC Santa Barbara.  I've heard rumors that 
it was the first NCP that was operational.)


>> 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?

I included "earliest discussions" and "My first participation" with the intent 
of constraining the scope of my comments.  These were the formative meetings for 
the standards effort.

I've no idea what "all those meetings" refers to, particularly in terms of 
reviewing the X.500 effort.

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net