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

[John Lowry]

You made me think of UUCP bang paths. :-)


> On Jul 5, 2020, at 11:27 PM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> 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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>> 
>> 
> 
> -- 
> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
> living as The Truth is True
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