[ih] .UK vs .GB

Brian E Carpenter brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com
Sun Apr 15 21:55:00 PDT 2018


Yes. At CERN we were gatewaying email between DECNET, "ARPANET", Grey Book,
EUNET (aka USENET), RSCS (aka EARN aka BITNET), and of course a little
X.400 (using Steve Kille's EAN).

Here's how we believed an "ARPA" user would send mail to a CERN user in 1987:
user%host%cernvax.bitnet at wiscvm.wisc.edu

(Non-paywall preprint of the paper: http://cds.cern.ch/record/182913/files/ )

   Brian


On 16/04/2018 08:44, Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond wrote:
> Dear Vint,
> 
> the dates are indeed similar.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols
> 
> They were indeed contemporary. And when I used them on DEC VAX, the
> address was something of the like: CBS%UK.AC.KCL.CC.ELM::ZDEE699  --
> which would be ZDEE699 at UK.AC.KCL.CC.ELM
> (my then email address :-) )
> To send to an Internet address: (you for example)
> CBS%UK.AC.NSFNET-RELAY::us.va.reston.cnri::vcerf
> 
> Sending to an X.400, one had to start with:
> CBS%UK.AC.MHS-RELAY::
> with the rest in quotes. Often the parser in the return made an absolute
> mess with X.400 sourced emails.
> 
> Also, note that CBS also accepted bang! paths, but the difference
> between the % and @ delimiters in specifically routed emails for
> example, vcerf%cnri.reston.va.us at nsfnet-relay.ac.uk didn't exist, thus
> it was :: all the way.
> 
> Kindest regards,
> 
> Olivier
> 
> ps. the "transition" came when one ran TCP-IP over X.25.
> 
> On 15/04/2018 21:03, Vint Cerf wrote:
>> does anyone on the list recall the rough dates for the "Colored Book
>> Protocol" ? Seems possible that these were at least contemporary with
>> DNS and UCL was confronted with the need to translate between those
>> and the ARPANET and/or Internet protocols of the time.
>>
>> v
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 15, 2018 at 11:47 AM, Eric Gade <eric.gade at gmail.com
>> <mailto:eric.gade at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     Also worth noting that in a May 1984 draft of RFC 920 (and a few
>>     drafts prior to this going back to April), ISO-3166 was *not*
>>     specified as a set for potential TLDs, but .UK *was* given as an
>>     example. In fact, the inclusion of UK was used by many
>>     participants discussing the draft to argue in favor of both a
>>     country-based set of TLDs and a more generic set (note that these
>>     early drafts used .PUB and .COR instead of .COM and .ORG). It was
>>     sometime between May and July that the ISO list was proposed as
>>     the ccTLD set.
>>
>>     On Sun, Apr 15, 2018 at 11:02 AM, John Klensin <jklensin at gmail.com
>>     <mailto:jklensin at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>         Yes, Nigel, I should (for several reasons) have remembered that
>>         comment in RFC 920, but my recollection is still consistent
>>         with that
>>         document and your list.  That timeline list is, IMO, extremely
>>         useful
>>         and far more accessible (and, IIR, comprehensive) that the Park
>>         dissertation.
>>
>>            john
>>
>>
>>         On Sun, Apr 15, 2018 at 10:20 AM, Nigel Roberts
>>         <nigel at channelisles.net <mailto:nigel at channelisles.net>> wrote:
>>         > Far be it from me to be seen to clarify John's first hand
>>         knowledge of
>>         > RFC 1591, but it's worth pointing out that the decision to use
>>         > ISO-3166-1 was not first documented in RFC 1591, but already
>>         in RFC 920
>>         > (October 1984) as follows
>>         >
>>         >> Countries
>>         >>
>>         >> The English two letter code (alpha-2) identifying a country
>>         according the the ISO Standard for "Codes for the
>>         Representation of Names of Countries" [5].
>>         >>
>>         >> As yet no country domains have been established.  As they
>>         are established information about the administrators and
>>         agents will be made public, and will be listed in subsequent
>>         editions of this memo."
>>         >>
>>         >
>>         > Stephen Deerhake and I put together an (as yet unfinished)
>>         hyperlinked
>>         > timeline of the DNS quite recently. Even though there are
>>         some places
>>         > where the editing is still a little rough, I think there is
>>         some useful
>>         > stuff which is not easily accessible otherwise.
>>         >
>>         > You can find it at http://timeline.as
>>         >
>>         > It does need a little work, and we need to move it from
>>         using TikiWiki
>>         > (which seemed like a good idea at the time) to something
>>         faster, but
>>         > there are some interesting things there...
>>         >
>>         >
>>         >
>>         >
>>         > On 04/15/2018 02:13 PM, John Klensin wrote:
>>         >>> The only explanation I got orally was that "GB stands for
>>         Great Britain, while UK stands for United Kingdom of Great
>>         Britain and the Northern Ireland".
>>         >>>
>>         >>> That was enough for me. Don't even remember who explained
>>         it, but it was around the famous entry of .CS into the root
>>         zone that created the "interesting" situation with
>>         CS.BERKELEY.EDU <http://CS.BERKELEY.EDU> (and others) and
>>         massive weird extra hacking in sendmail.cf
>>         <http://sendmail.cf> due to the Janet "reverse" order of
>>         labels in a domain name.
>>         >>
>>         >> Let me try an even less complicated one, based on what I
>>         was told when
>>         >> we were evaluating what became the decision to use ISO 3166
>>         alpha-2
>>         >> codes:   The country code system started because of a
>>         request from the
>>         >> UK to be able to manage their own DNS hierarchy rather than
>>         depending
>>         >> on a US-based organization to manage the TLD.  The ccTLDs
>>         are US and
>>         >> UK were decided upon (and possibly delegated) before other
>>         >> administrative decisions about ccTLDs were made and "UK"
>>         was what they
>>         >> asked for.
>>         >>
>>         >> FWIW: (1) While RFC 1591 was not published until 1994, it,
>>         for the
>>         >> most part, described thinking and procedures that had had
>>         been in
>>         >> place for years rather than anything of significant that
>>         was novel.
>>         >> (2) YJ Park, whom some of you may know, tried to sort
>>         though all of
>>         >> these issues and history while working on her
>>         dissertation.  The
>>         >> search for answers to questions of this type might
>>         reasonably start
>>         >> with her and that dissertation.  That should lead to some
>>         context and
>>         >> references even where she does not have exact answers.
>>         >>
>>         >>      john
>>         >>
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>>
>>     -- 
>>     Eric
>>
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