[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[John Day]

The distinction that is being made here seems to be the one I was pointing out:

What we thought was needed was purely something that mapped 
Application names to network addresses.  DNS is not quite that. 
Grapevine was that.

X.500 went way beyond that to try to include everything you might 
want to look up.  Actually, one might think of X.500 as Google 
without the web!  ;-)  So X.500 was far too much to effectively do 
the simple job that was necessary.  Much of this going overboard did 
come from the IFIP work that was going on.  This was the group who 
thought that defining the syntax of a protocol was a formal 
description of the protocol.  When you tried to explain to them there 
were actions or procedures that had to be defined to be a protoocl 
specification, they looked at you like you were from Mars.

Take care,
John


At 18:16 +0000 2011/02/17, Eric Gade wrote:
>On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 5:47 PM, Craig Partridge 
><<mailto:craig at aland.bbn.com>craig at aland.bbn.com> wrote:
>
>Then in January 1986, when the central question of finalizing DNS TLDs
>was decided, it was explicitly decided to structure .US to make it
>completely useless for X.500 migration. 
>
>
>This is really fascinating stuff.
>There is little documentation on Postel's perspective on such 
>matters, aside from anecdotes and what's in public, because his 
>archives at USC are off-limits (though they have been sorted) until 
>an 'appropriate' amount of time has passed.
>
>Still I managed to find interesting things in the NIC collection. 
>One is a paper that Postel co-authored with Mockapetris for a 
>conference and presented in April 1985. Using IFIP and DNS 
>propositions as examples, they go on to list the differences between 
>"Tree Systems" and "Attribute Systems." Here is the section that 
>interests me the most:
>
>One solution would be to layer an attribute system on top of a 
>self-sufficient tree system...
>
>I assumed that this was -- at the very least -- a concession made to 
>the OSI community, or that it was a way to somehow justify (though 
>how necessary would justification be?) the DNS being developed.
>
>I think there may be a case for saying that the inclusion of ccTLDs 
>in the first place was inspired -- at least in part -- by OSI 
>advocates precisely because that's the type of organization they 
>wanted at the top. The fact that the codes were pulled from an ISO 
>list might not be mere coincidence either, though I'm going out on a 
>limb with that.
>
>In terms of actual organizations and authorities, that's an 
>interesting case too. A lot of the correspondence seems to indicate 
>not only that the NIC didn't want the job of TLD registration and 
>administration, but that there were expectations that international 
>organizations would take these over, and suggestions included such 
>orgs as ANSI (side note: when ANSI started registering OSI names in 
>1988 or 89, it was charging a whopping $1k per name. NIC was still 
>doing this for free I think, but meeting notes show that early 
>projections of pricing were around $70).
>
>--
>Eric
>
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