[ih] .UK vs .GB

[Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond]

On 14/04/2018 05:57, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 14/04/2018 16:00, Patrik Fältström wrote:
>>
>>> On 13 Apr 2018, at 19:44, Eric Gade <eric.gade at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> The X.400/X.500 systems were simply going to replace everything anyway, so the wisdom went.
>> 😳
>>
>> But of course!!
> Why on earth we didn't all switch to X.400 is hard to imagine. For example,
> the X.400 human-readable version of a JANET address via a gateway would have
> been so simple:
> C = gb; ADMD = gold 400; PRMD = gw; DD.jnt-mail = user(a)domain.subdomains
>
> (Quoted from Recommendation for a shorthand X.400 address representation, 1989.)
>

I know we're all laughing about this now, but back then it was no
laughing matter. JANET was running no CCITT W series recommendations and
the policy Europe-wide was to promote X.25 and of course move to X.400
So all the way until the early nineties (1992?) we were told that the
way forward was to get our house systems in order to send/receive X.400
emails. And it was clear that the number of hoops to jump through to get
that darn X.400 working was beyond human. When sending through gateways,
one had to add/delete further complicated fields like O and OU, as well
as I & S or G, but most importantly, replace the ; with / and on systems
which did not accept /, use \/ or perhaps encapsulate on " " or \" or
\// especially if where were spaces or, God forbit, <LF> that might have
been added to the system because the email address wrapped around the
screen. One error and your email would bounce with something as helpful
as two words: "Unrecognized ORname", because for many gateways it
appeared to be the default error.
I remember signing a petition that ultimately went to JNT, asking to
keep NRS (if we were to stick to X.25), migrate to DNS (migration to
TCP-IP), but to avoid X.400 at all costs. To this day, I still cannot
believe some people were serious when they proposed the X.400 addressing
scheme... and that some people took the format seriously.
Kindest regards,

Olivier

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