Posted by maguay 1 day ago
Not even then, when people with access to computers were probably in the thousands, would anyone liked to type "C=no; ADMD=; PRMD=uninett; O=uninett; S=alvestrand; G=harald" just like in the example of the article.
To say nothing of popular names.
I've seen estimates that there are only 10,000 people with my last name in the US. Back in the days of local telephone directories, I was always the only one with that last name.
Internet scaling is an interesting thing. I don't know if I feel less unique or that I'm in an exclusive club.
I want a phone that can only ring if the source of the call is within artillery range.
Some examples from the article:
> You could have messaged an entire organization or department
This is a mailing list.
> So it was possible, say, for one implementation of X.400 to offer X.400 features like recalling a message, in theory at least, when such guarantees would fail as soon as messages left their walled garden. But “they couldn't buck the rules of physics,” Borenstein concluded. Once a message reached another server, the X.400 implementations could say that an email was recalled or permanently deleted, but there was no way to prove that it hadn’t been backed up surreptitiously.
This is a feature that (1) is in the spec, and also (2) is impossible to implement. That's not a real feature. It's a bug in the spec.
> You don’t email with X.400 today. That is, unless you work in aviation, where AMHS communications for sharing flight plans and more are still based on X.400 standards (which enables, among other things, prioritizing messages and sending them to the tower at an airport instead of a specific individual).
This is... also a mailing list. There's nothing difficult about having an email address for the tower. That email could go to one person, or many people. What's the difference supposed to be? What "feature" are we saying X.400 has that email didn't start with?
> This is a mailing list.
The way I understand it, the layering is different. In X.400, multicasting was a feature of the protocol. An SMTP mailing list, on the other hand, is an endpoint that terminates a protocol transaction, and then initiates one transaction for each final recipient.
I guess it boils down to where it is preferable to have the extra complexity: the ITU-T protocols invariably prefer to put it inside the network, while the Internet protocols prefer to put it at the endpoints. The SMTP protocol is simple, and therefore the mailing list software needs to be complex.
Reminds me of IPv6. ;)
That would have required a lot of changes to computing history beyond simply email, and I doubt many of them would have been improvements.
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."
https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/galls-law/
In my naive youth I always thought top-down design was the sensible way to build systems. But after witnessing so many of them fail miserably, I now agree with Gall.