[ih] DNS History

[John Day]

O, I am sorry Dave. It finally occurred to me what the source of your 
misconception was.  Working for MCI, you were seeing X.500 from the 
CCITT side of things.  They never did have much imagination and 
probably did see X.500 as primarily an email address database.

However, most of OSI was being driven out ISO and there the focus was 
quite different. Still wrong but quite different.  OSI was primarily 
an ISO affair severely compromised by CCITT lack of vision and the 
fact that most of the European participants had never written a line 
of network code for anything but X.25.

At 18:14 -0800 2010/03/08, Dave Crocker wrote:
>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