[ih] DNS History

[John Day]

At 19:29 -0800 2010/03/08, Richard Bennett wrote:
>Revised OSI Model: Layer 0 = Authentication; Layer 8 = Money.

Authentication was part of ACSE.

Money was the real subject of every layer.

>
>On 3/8/2010 7:18 PM, John Day wrote:
>>Yes but much this pays no attention to issues of security, access 
>>control or scope.
>>
>>At 17:51 -0800 2010/03/08, Richard Bennett wrote:
>>>And now there's this Semantic Web thing and the Bob Kahn Digital 
>>>Object Identifier systems that aim to expose structure in web 
>>>sites so that the content can be more easily indexed, searched, 
>>>and grabbed. In the end, it's all about granularity and 
>>>aggregating local indexes.
>>>
>>>On 3/8/2010 5:26 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>Could you say the same thing about X.500?
>>>>>
>>>>>>Nope -- early attempt to do the web.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Wasn't all that Archie and Veronica stuff an attempt to provide the
>>>>>>>Internet with a directory service?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>This exchange is confusing things a bit.
>>>>
>>>>The Web publishes documents and has evolved into something that 
>>>>is probably best viewed as allowing interaction with documents. 
>>>>(That might be a Procrustean view, given the lofty views of web 
>>>>2.0, etc., but I'm trying to stay with basics.)
>>>>
>>>>Google, et all, scan the web and index it.  A search engine is 
>>>>not 'the web', although it is a tool of the web.  The web is 
>>>>either the documents or the full set of things that touch the 
>>>>documents.  But a search engine is not 'the' web.
>>>>
>>>>Anonymous FTP published documents.  Lousy usability 
>>>>characteristics. Gopher published documents. Reasonable 
>>>>usability, but limited document style. They were the early 
>>>>sequence that led to the actual Web.
>>>>
>>>>Archie indexed ftp.  Veronica indexed gopher. Early search 
>>>>engines. These are services that are layered on top of the 
>>>>publication service and the publication service is passive, in 
>>>>that there was no organized registration of the documents, 
>>>>particularly, with respect to the indexing (more recent active 
>>>>web page support of search engines not withstanding.)
>>>>
>>>>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 
>>>>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 
>>>>relative to your provider, which led to some interesting business 
>>>>cards, for folks who had multiple providers.)
>>>>
>>>>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.)
>>>>
>>>>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.
>>>>
>>>>The differences between document publishing, personnel 
>>>>registration, name lookup and name (or, more generally, 
>>>>attribute) searching each warrant distinction from the other.
>>>>
>>>>d/
>>>
>>>--
>>>Richard Bennett
>>>Research Fellow
>>>Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
>>>Washington, DC
>>
>
>--
>Richard Bennett
>Research Fellow
>Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
>Washington, DC