[ih] .UK vs .GB

[Brian E Carpenter]

below...
On 15/04/2018 12:18, Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

The document I quoted was written in all seriousness, because although
the assumption was that the UI would normally hide all details of X.400
addresses, there was a question on everybody's tongue: "What should I
put on my business card?" And indeed it was submitted as
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG4/N102 (by Denise Heagerty at CERN and Ruediger
Grimm at GMD Darmstadt).

I think I did once see a business card with an X.400 address (but
certainly not from Denise or Ruediger, who had more sense.)

X.400 addressing is a great example of design by committee, in which
consensus was reached by including everything suggested by anybody.
There were apparently 14 different keywords.

    Bian