On Tue, 13 Mar 2007, Brent Hilpert wrote:
<<SNIP>>
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.
Well, X.400 still gets used in certain applications. I think the UK
military use it a lot, and gets used for transporting EDI messages between
in supply chain stuff. Also the basis for the Air Traffic Services (ATS)
Message Handling Services used in ground-ground comms between airports to
exchange flight plans etc. This is new, actively developed and not legacy.
arcarlini at
iee.org wrote:
HEPNET was an OSI network at one point wasn't
it?
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.
Commercial implementations of X.500 still being developed. It's just that
they play down the X.500 bit due to the stigma attached and position their
products more as top end LDAP with standards based shadowing, chaining and
access control etc.
Andrew Back wrote:
Would be nice to be able to play around with this
stuff though, and
properly use the X.400 MTA & X.500 DSA you get licensed via OpenVMS
Hobbyist.
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.
Cool. That would be good as the only other implementation generally
avilable is an old ISO-DE release. Do it :o)
Andrew