17 Aug
2024
17 Aug
'24
7:20 a.m.
On 2024-08-16 17:47, George Michaelson wrote:
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" <mailto:tuhs@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.
Ah yes, I was trying to remember JANET but was too lazy to do the research.
Honestly, I thought that JANET got it right and the rest of us
different, so that:
user(a)top.middle.bottom (e.g., eric(a)edu.berkeley.cs)
would allow strict left-to-right parsing. Actually I wanted
cs.berkeley.edu:eric — if that was true everywhere, sendmail would have
been so much easier. A major reason for very generic rewriting rules is
that basic parsing algorithms (notably LALR(1)) couldn't be made
generic. At Berkeley
uunet!foo!bar(a)berkeley.edu
meant that the message should be sent to the UUCP host (ucbvax at the
time, iirc, which from Ing70 translated to "ucbvax:uunet!foo!bar"), but
host::user@decwrl.com
should be sent to decwrl unchanged. See the book "!%@:: A directory of
Electronic Mail Addressing & Networks" for a taste of just how bad it was.
Jim at, Leeds uni and then heriot-watt wrote the sendmail.cf
<http://sendmail.cf> to dis-un-combobulate uk.ac <http://uk.ac> to
ac.uk <http://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
Heh. It reminds me of some of Teus Hagen's escapades in the early days.
But Teus was earlier, when networking meant UUCP.
eric