[ih] deterioration of email (was Re: clever usc creation)

[Miles Fidelman]

List managers seem to be a survivor.  Wikis have emerged as well.

Pretty much every large project, both corporate & open source, seems to be organized around a group of email lists, a file server, a dcvs (usually git), a ticketing system, and a wiki.  Shared calendar, directory, and map layers are pretty common as well.

The IETF.org tools are a good baseline, using open protocols that tie into standard email, calendars, and browsers.  Opensearch & CQL also tie a lot of things together.

I'm also becoming quite enamored of the IPFS ecosystem - or more precisely, libp2p.

Miles

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________________________________
From: Internet-history <internet-history-bounces at elists.isoc.org> on behalf of Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
Sent: Friday, 07 August 2026 15:48:35
To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
Subject: Re: [ih] deterioration of email (was Re: clever usc creation)

Interesting discussion, but focussing back on history....

In the 1970s, ARPA created a program called CAHCOM - Computer Assisted
Human COMmunications - to explore how to use computers talking amongst
themselves over some kind of network to assist humans in their own
communications among humans.   This was one of the major elements of
Licklider's vision of zillions of interacting computers helping people
do everything people do.

Over the next decade or so, a lot of different mechanisms, protocols,
and research created what seem to me to be the precursors of many
mechanisms for human interaction used in today's Internet.

In the 1970s/80s, the vision was that each such mechanism would be
captured in some kind of standard protocol and algorithms, and that they
would somehow be integrated.  For example, a "conversation" might start
out as a telephone call, migrate to an online discussion, and evolve
into a real-time interactive videoconference.    All of those
interactions might be saved and accessible to humans brought into the
conversation later, as well as to History.   The Datacomputer, with its
massive terabit (!!) of online memory, would store it all.

I'd argue that much of today's human interactions are descendants of the
early research - USENET and NNTP preceded social media.  MBone preceded
all of today's teleconferencing systems.  Email preceded today's walled
gardens of messaging, as well as "texting" with SMS, RCS, et al.   IRC
preceded today's various mechanisms for online chatting and texting.

Many of these systems and technologies are still used by some parts of
the Internet community.  But none of them have established a standard
for their form of CAHCOM.  Worse yet, few if any of today's copycat
systems interoperate.   We're all forced to use multiple disjoint
mailboxes, chat rooms, forums, teleconferences, voicemails, and devices
to communicate with other humans.   Sometimes it seems our
interconnected computers are making it harder to communicate rather than
easier.

It seems to me that only TCP, or perhaps only IP and UDP, has emerged as
a standard for communications between computers, with no standards for
computers to assist communications among humans.  Earlier communications
mechanisms, such as postal mail and telephony, evolved into worldwide
services.   Even banking and finance work globally.  But not CAHCOM; at
least not yet.

Why did that happen?

Perhaps it was just inevitable, as research results migrate into the
real world of economics and competition?

Perhaps it's simply not done yet, taking longer than we should expect?

Perhaps the researchers simply forgot or neglected to do something (such
as make the tech simple to deploy and use)?

Perhaps governments didn't do enough to establish laws, treaties,
regulations, and such mechanisms to guide the evolution?

Perhaps Metcalfe's Law is wrong, and networks are actually more valuable
when they are walled gardens of captive communities?

Perhaps...?

/Jack Haverty