17 Aug
2024
17 Aug
'24
6:47 a.m.
On Sat, 17 Aug 2024, 7:08 am Eric Allman via TUHS, <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
Don't forget DECnet (host::user) and things like
some mercifully dead UK
network that reversed the domain names, so this mailing list would be
"tuhs(a)org.tuhs" <tuhs(a)org.tuhs>. And the compiled in configuration that
delivermail used was becoming unwieldy as the world get bigger, hence a
configuration file.
eric
Steve Kille famously said on the JANET (for that was the network) uk mail
list for mail of the UK.ac decision "its research and its ok to experiment"
- the main advantage was clarity of the scoping to which element to look at
going to far off faroffia: it was the rightmost element in the token list
for you normal people and the leftmost for us. Since we are western
alphabet and alrwsdy parsing the user@host left to right it meant in
principle the channel for faroffia was found faster from a shorter index
token starting from 0.
Jim at, Leeds uni and then heriot-watt wrote the sendmail.cf to
dis-un-combobulate uk.ac to ac.uk which obviously many many sysadmins in
the UK ran with. He was really meant to be doing functional programming
research I think. We shared an office for a few months at Leeds, it was ex
English school and reputedly where Tolkien sat out his days before
Cambridge came good. Leeds could have taken free(ish) mail from York on x25
and preferred to dial the Heriot-Watt in edinburgh to get uucp. Acoustic
coupler modem days. I think has they known, Charles Forsyth in York would
have done uucp over Janet /x25 but people sometimes do the other thing, not
because it's hard but just because.
G