[ih] Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[Dave CROCKER]

On 2/10/2011 7:18 PM, John Day wrote:
> I was a little confused by Dave Crocker's comment. about X.400 email addresses.
> It doesn't sound right since they were in the Application Layer and names were
> location independent. However, since X.400 was primarily developed by the PTT
> faction of OSI, I can readily believe that their implementations were tied to
> providers. Although I doubt this was the general case. But I can check.


I have no idea what "location independent" naming this refers to, but it wasn't 
X.400 email addresses:

    <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.400#Addressing>

Addressing was designed as a set of attribute/value pairs, including 
"Administrative Management Domain (ADMD)" which specified the carrier. You had a 
different address for each ADMD you could access.

In a coarse-grained manner, this was source routing, for a model of

     organization -> carrier -> organization

Eventually, there enough organizations connected to all the x.400 telco carriers 
-- yes, I mean all, because the total wasn't large -- for an X.400 hack to be 
allowed which explicitly specified a null ADMD, meaning "use whichever one you 
want".

Separately, the human factors of a long sequence of textual attribute/value 
pairs was impressively unwieldy.

d/

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net