ftp archives disappearing?

Andrew Back wrote: arcarlini at iee.org wrote: Ohhh noooo ... OSI and X.400 ... For a good portion of the 80's I worked on a project developing an X.400 mail system & OSI stack. X.400 received a lot of attention back then as it was supposed to be (or become) the international standard for email transfer. I was out of that by the late 80's when the Internet was 'opened' and rolled over everything. I now think of that period as the era of the protocol wars. arcarlini at iee.org wrote: In the mid 80's I think it was mostly DECNET and SNA, reflecting the machines/systems installed at the participating organisations. Some of those orgs/nodes used our X.400 system, so there was some OSI in there. I have no idea what happened after 1988 or so, though, although I wouldn't be surprised if they always had it in mind to migrate to international standards. Andrew Back wrote: On a similar note to Francesca's message about one's old data turning up years later, a little while ago I asked a friend working at a local university if they had any 9-track tapes still kicking around as I could use some spares/scratch tapes. He took me to a storage room filled with a several shelves of them and said take your choice. Looking over the reels I saw a distribution tape from 1987 for the X.400 system I worked on, complete with source code. (There were also some BSD unix dists from the 80's in there.) So if I ever get a system to read the tape and run the X.400 system, and if there is a common network level to agree on we could do some old-school international-standard email networking ... <pause> ... on the other hand I'm not entirely sure I want to go (back) there.