[ih] A paper

[Bob Purvy]

since we're winding down here:

I personally worked on an X.400 gateway to 3Com's mail system, and got a
trip to Paris out of it. This was in 1989, so at least some people still
thought X.400 was still going to be important.

It was never deployed (and from a personal standpoint, I would not say I
covered myself with glory on that one, either).

The world had plenty of chances to embrace this CCITT standard (since the
first version was released in 1984), and they rejected it. X.500 fared a
little better, in that we now have LDAP.

On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 8:43 AM Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond via
Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 18/07/2021 23:45, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
> > Thanks (and Vint) for that injection of facts. I'd like to qualify one
> remark, though.
> >
> >> IMHO, NONE of the decisions made at the time were "political" in nature.
> > It does slightly depend on where you were sitting though. Where I was
> sitting from
> > early 1985 (the networking group at CERN) our main motivation was to get
> from a
> > horribly diverse set of protocols to a standard set, and that pushed us
> very hard
> > towards OSI, and that was our official policy. We changed that policy a
> few years
> > later when it was clear that TCP/IP was much more widely supported by our
> > vendors
> > than OSI. That was all entirely pragmatic and technically based. However,
> > there
> > was tremendous pressure from two quarters against that choice, purely on
> political
> > grounds: from European Commission officials and from the incumbent
> telecom carriers
> > (i.e. the PTTs). Of course that wasn't anything to do with human rights
> impact,
> > but only to do with defending European industrial interests against
> perceived
> > US high-tech hegemony, and defending the incumbent telcos' monopolies. So
> > it
> > was also bound up with the general push towards telco deregulation.
> Another factor
> > was the ITU (just down the road from CERN) defending its territory
> against the
> > encroachment of the cheeky Internet upstarts.
>
> There were two points of view in the early 90s. On the one hand,
> technical, the people actually using the computing resources had a
> choice between the ITU protocols on big mainframes that were cumbersome
> to use (try X.400 email addressing) and that necessitated hacks like
> Kermit to get files transferred across to their PCs. On the other, a
> multiplication of free software like KA9Q & other pc-based software
> allowed for a TCP-IP stack on a PC. Technically it wasn't even a choice.
> It seems to me the ITU protocols lost the battle, the moment personal
> computers became commonplace.
> But politically in Europe, what you described above was *exactly* what
> was going on - even in the UK, when it was time to evolve JANET in the
> early 90s.
> Kindest regards,
>
> Olivier
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