[ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 69, Issue 11

[John Day]

Agreed and the plea to construct it in a modular fashion so that not everyone needed to do the whole thing fell on deaf ears.

The same could be said for X.500.

Both were seen by their proponents as services to be provided by PTTs.

It didn’t help that the groups doing them believed that specifying the format of a message was a ‘formal description of the protocol.’

Or that all protocol exchanges were request/response.

etc. etc.

> On Aug 17, 2025, at 10:35, Craig Partridge via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Trying here, with some difficulty, to inject a historian's style of
> perspective.
> 
> I sometimes view X.400 as caught between "second system syndrome" (because
> an effective worldwide email system based on RFC 733 formatting and
> multiple transports existed [ARPANET+UUCP+CSNET+BITNET]) as X.400 was
> starting c. 1981/2 and "plan to throw one away" because X.400 decided to
> jump into the multimedia mail space, at a time that people were only just
> beginning to develop solutions (e.g. Bob Thomas' group at BBN which
> produced something called Slate and the CMU campus program [their version
> of MIT's Project Athena] -- and more, I just don't remember them all).
> 
> So the project was almost inevitably doomed by a combination of trying to
> fix all that was wrong with the first generation and, thanks to the first
> generation, being able to see that multimedia was the future, but having
> nowhere near enough experience to know how to do it.  Add the usual
> international standards/telecomm standards pressures and...
> 
> Craig
> 
> On Sun, Aug 17, 2025 at 10:11 AM Bob Purvy via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>>> I would have used "unreliable", "unpredictable" and "flimsy"
>> as adjectives for X.400.
>> 
>> Amen. 3Com had a contract with a French company to do it for us, which
>> earned me a trip to Paris. It never worked right and we finally abandoned
>> it.
>> 
>> a poster child for "the perfect is the enemy of the good."
>> 
>> On Sat, Aug 16, 2025 at 11:48 PM Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond via
>> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 17/08/2025 04:13, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote:
>>>>    *X.400* for its message handling services. This protocol provides a
>>>>    robust "store-and-forward" system for transmitting messages and is
>>> known
>>>>    for its advanced addressing and security capabilities.
>>> 
>>> For the anedcote, my recollection of X.400 was that it was far from
>>> "robust". I would have used "unreliable", "unpredictable" and "flimsy"
>>> as adjectives for X.400. In theory, it sounded great, but in practice,
>>> its setting up and use was so complex that one small discrepancy and it
>>> it wouldn't work properly. IMHO a classic example of wanting to do too
>>> much.
>>> 
>>> O.
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> 
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