[ih] Internet should be in private hands

[Dr Eberhard W Lisse]

In the very beginning when my little 286 was the only box in .NA,
and Namibia for that matter, running UUPC on MS-DOS with the
fantastic PC-Elm written by a friend of mine in Turbo-C, using
MicroEmacs as the editor and a 2000 line BAT script to tie this
all together, it took me a while to figure out why there was
traffic coming my way which looked like it should have gone to
.NZ.

I was using a German keyboard a the time which is QWERTZ ie the Y
is close to the A but on the predominant standard keyboards
(QUERTY) the Z is close to the A so a typo would push that my way.

Then eventually I also saw a bit of traffic for .UA (handwritten
looks similar to .NA :-)-O)

I also recall that there was some Radio Amateur mail system where
the developers had thought that .NA was a great abbreviation for
North America.  As soon as there was a mail gateway (of sorts) to
the fledgeling Internet, I saw traffic for these too :-)-O

But the coolest stuff was for NAVY.MIL when some server in the
Great Lakes region cut off "VY.MIL".

I tried to figure out who to email in this regards (remember that
was before the Web) but never received a response until I somehow
found the email address of an Admiral there.  He copied me in to a
polite but stern instruction to have that fixed and I never saw
one of those again :-)-O


Technically (I think) Great Britain refers to England, Scotland
and Wales.

Technically (I think) the United Kingdom refers to Great Britain
and Northern Ireland.

So it does make sense to me that JANET which was a network of
universities and research institutions after all used something
like UK.2ld.3ld.4ld instead of GB.2ld.3ld.4ld because the network
included the institutions in Northern Ireland.

It predated the DNS (or at least the registration date of the two
ccTLDs .UK and .GB).  Eventually there were gateways "turning
around" the addresses (as below) so people would have been used to
emailing to 4ld.3ld.2ld.UK and changing that to 4ld.3ld.2ld.GB
would have been impractical.

Unfortunately on the ISO's Browsing Platform there is no history
for UK even though it would be really interesting to see when
that was reserved (on the request by HM Government, by the way).

el


On 08/12/2022 16:24, Craig Partridge via Internet-history wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 8, 2022 at 12:59 AM George Ross via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>>
>> The naming scheme which JANET-attached Universties used did
>> start with "uk" rather than "gb" -- we were uk.ac.ed.cs.  That
>> was in place before we joined the IP internet and started using
>> the DNS too, and I suspect the prospect of sites having two
>> different names or else having to change the JANET scheme,
>> which was much more heavily used than the DNS at the time,
>> didn't appeal, in addition to the political sensitivities.
>>
>> We renamed ourselves as dcs.ed.ac.uk shortly after, to avoid
>> confusion in the mail gateways, as .CS was a ccTLD.
>>
> 
> Quick gloss on George's note for those who weren't there.  The
> UK, due to JANET or simply a magnetic attraction to doing things
> the opposite way from most folks, initially had domain names
> with the TLD first.
> 
> This meant a bunch of Internet email systems had a "both-ways"
> switch that involved parsing domain names left to right and
> right to left to see if either version made sense.
> 
> Eventually, as the DNS grew, some domain names made sense in
> both directions (stories that some in the DNS leadership team
> encouraged this mayhem to persuade our friends in the UK to
> rethink their ordering reflect joking comments at the time, but
> I don't think anyone did it intentionally) and this led to
> changes such as those George describes.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Craig
> 
> 

-- 
Dr. Eberhard W. Lisse   \         /       Obstetrician & Gynaecologist
el at lisse.NA             / *      |  Telephone: +264 81 124 6733 (cell)
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