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

[Bob Purvy]

X.500 at least lives on, in a truncated form, as LDAP.

On Sun, Aug 17, 2025 at 8:18 AM John Day via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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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