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

[Dr Eberhard W Lisse]

While I think X.400 was a design by committee it surely made sense to 
the committee :-)-O. 

At the time :-)-O

I remember talking to senior staff at the computer center of the
Technical University Aachen (RWTH) where I studied medicine in the 80's
and was playing with BITNET and its connections to other networks (there
was no Internet in Germany yet).

The guy was convinced that X.400 was the way of the future, and I seem 
to recall that this was related to the RWTH being involved with the DFN 
(German Research Network).


Given that we have QR codes and address books, the hyperventilating
about X.400 addresses is amusing :-)-O. If events had not taken over we
would all be used to nice interfaces of mail programs where one could
enter the elements in a nice way to be available for easy use.

And while

	el at lisse.NA

is of course preferable to

	G=Eberhard;S=Lisse;O=Lisse;P=Lisse;A=Paratus;C=na

not only for unwieldiness, but also for provider independence (DNS), I
am most unsure how store and forward would have scaled to current
volumes :-)-O

el

On 07/07/2020 13:08, John Lowry via Internet-history wrote:
> 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"
[...]