[ih] Design choices in SMTP

[Steve Crocker]

Heh, heh.  Here's an unexpected consequence.

UCLA's 360/91, the centerpiece of the Campus Computing Network (CCN) was
one of the supercomputers of the day.  DARPA/IPTO purchased a large chunk
of computing time to support the climate dynamics research work we were
doing.  One of the key investigators was at Rand Corp in Santa Monica.  The
CCNRJE protocol made it possible for the Rand folks to interact with CCN
without driving to UCLA.

In 1974, I left DARPA and moved back to Los Angeles.  I started working at
ISI, but I still needed to complete my PhD thesis at UCLA.  Although I
didn't need to take any more classes, I noticed an interesting course in
the catalog on Public Systems Analysis, taught by Jan Chaiken.  Chaiken was
on the staff at Rand and was teaching the course on the side.  It looked
interesting, so I signed up for the course.

Chaiken organized the course to move from basic material on various public
systems, e.g. location of fire stations, and math stuff progressing toward
more practical problems.  For the third quarter, we took on the problem of
reorganizing the scheduling elective surgeries at the Kaiser Permanente
Health System.  They were experiencing 108% occupancy in the middle of each
week, with patients sleeping on gurneys in the hallways.  However, on the
weekends, occupancy dropped to something like 70%.  The solution to
rescheduling turned out to be a very manageable integer programming
problem.  (Integer programming is the same as linear programming except the
solution points have to be at integer lattice points within the feasible
space.)

One of the application packages available at CCN was a linear and integer
programming package, so all we had to do was gather the necessary data and
submit it to CCN for processing.

In prior years when the class needed to use CCN for the class project,
Chaiken would meet with students at UCLA to submit programs to CCN and wait
for the results.  I pointed out he could do the same from Rand.  Thus, in
spring 1975, we sat in air conditioned offices at Rand one day while we
iterated our submissions.

Chaiken declared it was the best thing he had learned in several years of
teaching the course ;)

Steve

On Thu, Feb 9, 2023 at 10:32 AM John Day via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> NETRJE didn’t get a lot of use because the systems that could support a
> Server FTP didn’t need the NETRJE. (Can someone correct me about that?)
>
> What did get a lot of use of was CCNRJE written by Bob Braden for the UCLA
> CCN 360/91. It opened a Telnet connection to the CCNRJE server and then did
> data transfers with connections a fixed offset from the Telnet connection:
> one for input, one for output. (Remember all of these applications were
> using Initial Connection Protocol (ICP) to move the initial connection off
> the well-known socket.
>
> Take care,
> John
>
> > On Feb 8, 2023, at 17:54, Steffen Nurpmeso via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >
> > Craig Partridge wrote in
> > <CAHQj4Cedsaw0OrN+d8jHohjxQLrhLPHuC+S81=QT-ATn2W8gdQ at mail.gmail.com>:
> > |On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 2:24 PM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
> > |internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> > |> On 2/8/2023 1:02 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> > |>>
> > |>> Here RFC 354 (THE FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL) and RFC 385 (COMMENTS ON
> > |>> THE FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL) are missing, the latter includes MAIL
> > |>> and MLFL.
> > |>
> > |> Count me as both befuddled and embarrassed.  No idea why/how I missed
> \
> > |> 385.
> > |>
> > |> I left off 354 because it doesn't provide any email protocol
> specificati\
> > |> on.
> > |>
> > |> The fact that 385 explicitly specifies MAIL and MLFL makes the fact
> that
> > |> neither are in the RFC 542 version of FTP quite odd..
> > |>
> > |My recollection, from the digging into this that I did for the article
> on
> > |the history of email for IEEE Annals,  is there
> > |was a tension between the FTP and email teams.  There was a meeting
> about
> > |FTP at MIT in March 1973 (that led to 542) where the FTP team
> > |had decided to punt on email issues, only to have their DARPA PM (Steve
> > |Crocker) show up and tell them that email mattered.
> > |After the meeting, the group decided (in some sense, flouting Steve)
> that
> > |email should really be in a separate annex and left email
> > |commands out of RFC 542.  (As I recall, they were on a page by Jon
> Postel
> > |in the ARPANET Protocol Handbook but may be misremembering).
> >
> > I am noting that 542 neither mentions 385 nor 475 at all.
> > RFC 475 states
> >
> >   This paper describes my understanding of the results of the Network
> >   Mail System meeting SRI-ARC on February 23, 1973, and the
> >   implications for FTP (File Transfer Protocol).  There was general
> >   agreement at the meeting that network mail function should be within
> >   FTP.
> >
> >   FTP currently provides two commands for handling mail.[.]
> >
> >   [.]Local mail and SNDMSG
> >   programs have been modified at many sites to include network mailing
> >   (e.g., USER at HOST at BBN_TENEX and MAIL host user at MIT-DMCG).
> >
> > And this does not sound to me as if it would have been wishful
> > thinking, but rather that it was actively being used?
> >
> > RFC 542 states in "MISCELLANEOUS COMMANDS"
> >
> >   There are several functions that utilize the services of file
> >   transfer but go beyond it in scope.  These are the Mail and Remote
> >   Job Entry functions.  It is suggested that these become auxiliary
> >   protocols that can assume recognition of file transfer commands on
> >   the part of the server, i.e., they may depend on the core of FTP
> >   commands.  The command sets specific to Mail and RJE will be given in
> >   separate documents.
> >
> > It also defines response status bits for mail.  My local RFC pool
> > does not have the necessary bits to do sleuthing.
> >
> > --steffen
> > |
> > |Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
> > |der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
> > |einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
> > |(By Robert Gernhardt)
> > --
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>
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