[ih] early competition and networking

[John R. Levine]

>> Some is very baroque like the mail gateways Dave worked on. 
>
> OK. I'll take the bait...
>
> Which gateways were extravagant, bizarre or complex, and in what ways?

I'd say the contortions we went through to get mail between SMTP and X.400 
and other systems in the 1980s and 90s were pretty baroque.  Look at all 
the stuff in RFC 2156, which is 144 pages trying to make X.400 and MIME 
interoperate.

R's,
John

PS: Usenet also had a nice layering system.  The most popular transport layer 
was dialup UUCP, but we hear the NSA got their feed on reels of 1/2" 
magtape.