[ih] internet-history Digest, Vol 41, Issue 7

Elizabeth Feinler feinler at earthlink.net
Wed Mar 10 15:14:38 PST 2010


FYI, I think you all are referring to James E. (Jim) White.  He was a student at Santa Barbara, came to SRI in the 70s to work in Engelbart's group, was a member of IFIP 6.5, and if I remember rightly served on the ISO committees as well.  Last I heard of Jim he was working for General Magic, but I have since lost track of him.
On Mar 8, 2010, at 11:31 PM, internet-history-request at postel.org wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
> 
>   1. Re: DNS History (John Day)
>   2. Re: DNS History (John Day)
>   3. Re: DNS History (Kevin Dunlap)
>   4. Re: DNS History (Richard Bennett)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2010 22:45:12 -0500
> From: John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: [ih] DNS History
> To: Dave Crocker <dcrocker at gmail.com>, John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net>
> Cc: internet-history at postel.org
> Message-ID: <a0624085bc7bb722b07d7@[168.122.9.31]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
> 
> That was the limited view that CCITT and IFIP WG6.5 brought to it. 
> If I remember right, the work of IFIP WG6 was significantly 
> diminished after 79.  IFIP was only a liaison organization to ISO (as 
> opposed to a Member Body) and had no real  relation with CCITT.  I 
> don't think there were liaison representatives to CCITT.
> 
> Discussions of the directory and what would be in the NWI were 
> initiated as a result of the work on the Naming and Addressing Part 
> of the Model.  (Although, the Naming and Addressing Part just 
> provided the official impetus for something that had been in the plan 
> for some time. ) The IFIP contribution was merely one feeder into 
> that broader work.  From the point of the model, the primary purpose 
> of the Directory was application name to address mapping.  Anything 
> beyond that was gravy.
> 
> 
> At 19:20 -0800 2010/03/08, Dave Crocker wrote:
>> On 3/8/2010 7:09 PM, John Day wrote:
>>> Ah, yes, Dave attending one design session would certainly be
>>> definitive. Whereas, I was probably in only 50-100+ X.500 related
>>> meetings from before it was even a Work Item or it was known as X.500
>>> and was the designated arbiter by SC21 on some of their more
>>> controversial issues. But then what would I know?
>> 
>> That's probably the disconnect.
>> 
>> The meetings I went to were before that.  They well might have been 
>> IFIP WG 6.5 meetings, feeding into the start of the ISO/CCITT 
>> effort, since for example I didn't go to Geneva.  This was the same 
>> model as had been done for what became x.400 (but was initially 
>> known as X.MHS during the first round of specification.)
>> 
>>>>>> 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.\
>>> 
>>> As I said, actually it didn't. That was later as the scope expanded.
>> 
>> Which is quite strange, since it was the only focus on the initial 
>> discussions.
>> 
>>>> (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.)
>>> 
>>> Jack White was at SRI in the early days and was responsible for much of
>>> the NSW.
>> 
>> John was first at UCSB.  He moved to SRI later.   While he was 
>> there, around 1980, he supervised a CMU summer student who created 
>> the RPC scheme that you love.
>> 
>> This was during the IFIP WG 6.5 discussions that were starting up 
>> the X.400 effort.
>> 
>>> Really. I don't remember seeing your name on any of the delegate lists
>>> representing the US. Once again, I think you only perceived them to the
>>> be the formative discussions. Discussions had been going on for some time.
>> 
>> Yes they had.
>> 
>> d/
>> --
>> 
>>  Dave Crocker
>>  Brandenburg InternetWorking
>>  bbiw.net
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2010 22:46:58 -0500
> From: John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: [ih] DNS History
> To: Richard Bennett <richard at bennett.com>, John Day
> 	<jeanjour at comcast.net>
> Cc: internet-history at postel.org
> Message-ID: <a0624085cc7bb74ebacc6@[168.122.9.31]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2010 20:40:47 -0800
> From: Kevin Dunlap <kevin at Dunlap.Org>
> Subject: Re: [ih] DNS History
> To: Richard Bennett <richard at bennett.com>
> Cc: internet-history at postel.org
> Message-ID: <55048BFB-788C-4A8F-922D-10B64EEC8E9A at dunlap.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> You forgot layer 9 = Political
> http://www.isc.org/store/logoware-clothing/isc-9-layer-osi-model-cotton-t-shirt
> 
> On Mar 8, 2010, at 7:29 PM, Richard Bennett wrote:
> 
>> Revised OSI Model: Layer 0 = Authentication; Layer 8 = Money.
>> 
>> 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
> 
> Kevin Dunlap
> 425-296-9255
> Kevin at Dunlap.org
> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kjdunlap
> 
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> 
> Message: 4
> Date: Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:31:08 -0800
> From: Richard Bennett <richard at bennett.com>
> Subject: Re: [ih] DNS History
> To: Kevin Dunlap <kevin at Dunlap.Org>
> Cc: internet-history at postel.org
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