[ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 10, Issue 1

[Brian E Carpenter]

Geoff,

That was all very derivative... it originated in 1989, when Denise Heagerty
(in my group at CERN) and Rüdiger Grimm (at GMD) wrote the original proposal:
https://cds.cern.ch/record/202026?ln=en

Although I had an X.400ish address at that time thanks to EAN, I never had it
on a business card; in fact I doubt that I ever gave it to anybody.

As far as I can tell, Rüdiger's umlaut would have been problematic. The G field
seems to have been restricted to ASCII in the 1989 version. RFC 1685 is also
weak on that front. (The IAB character set workshop, which put this issue on
the table, wasn't until 1996.)

Regards
   Brian Carpenter

On 06-Jul-20 15:26, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history wrote:
> craig, oh please, don't "forget" what our email addresses would have been
> 🤔😳😦😬😱
> [copy and pasted from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.400 page], viz.:
> 
> An X.400 address consists of several elements, including:
> 
>    - C (Country name)
>    - ADMD (Administration Management Domain, short-form A), usually a
>    public mail service provider
>    - PRMD (Private Management Domain, short-form P)
>    - O (Organization name)
>    - OU (Organizational Unit Names), OU is equivalent to OU0, can have OU1,
>    OU2...
>    - G (Given name)
>    - I (Initials)
>    - S (Surname)
> 
> The standards themselves originally did not specify how these email
> addresses should be written (for instance on a business card) or even
> whether the field identifiers should be upper or lower case, or what
> character sets were allowed. RFC 1685
> <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1685> specified
> one encoding, based on a 1993 draft of ITU-T Recommendation F.401, which
> looked like:
> "G=Harald;S=Alvestrand;O=Uninett;PRMD=Uninett;A=;C=no"
> 
> On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 3:28 PM Craig Partridge via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>>> Can you imagine the word fighting the COVID-19
>>> pandemic without the internet? If there were no internet, there could be
>>> very little working from home, no online classes for students stuck at
>>> home, no video communication with family and friends, much more
>> loneliness,
>>> no way to stop rumors and get scientific information to ordinary people,
>>> etc.
>>
>> Just for fun, as alternative history is simply about fun, we probably can
>> envision a world without the Internet.  The CCITT and ITU worked very hard
>> to create one.
>>
>> So we'd have whatever the descendant of the videophone is.  I imagine we'd
>> have three jacks in some wall outlets: voice, video, and data (cf. what
>> they tried to do for ATM).  Your cable modem would be similar (indeed, it
>> is now -- coax for video, phone jack for phone, Ethernet jack for data).
>> Data service would be slow -- say 1.5Mbps and you'd pay a premium to
>> originate video.
>>
>> Computers would have still gotten incredibly fast, so we'd have apps that
>> combined the inputs from the three jacks on the computer to give us video
>> conferencing with shared documents and such.
>>
>> I don't know what social media would look like.  My guess is YouTube
>> doesn't exist (the conditions that enabled YouTube would not be present).
>>
>> Charges for videoconferencing would be high -- document sharing and joint
>> editing would be expensive and you'd be much less efficient than you'd be
>> in your regular office, which was wired with some sort of switched local
>> data sharing network (think Netware -- which remember, was doing better
>> than the Internet for part of the 1980s).
>>
>> Craig
>>
>> --
>> *****
>> Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and
>> mailing lists.
>> --
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>>
>>
>