[Info-vax] Rethinking DECNET ?

[JF Mezei]

On 14-09-06 16:32, Johnny Billquist wrote:

> Functionality wise, DECnet do have some things in there which is way 
> better (in my opinion) to what exists in the IP world, but also some 
> things that are horribly worse. (CTERM anyone...?)

No computer vendor wanted to abandon features in their existing stack by
adopting a lower common denominator. So they got together and devised
OSI which included all the features they currently supported.

> Read receipts... I've never understood the point of them. It puts the 
> world in a very syncronous mode, which sucks. MAIL-11 is still no fun,

Sorry, but read receipts were very useful. Knowing when the recipient
READ the message. (not when it was delivered). And was very commonly
used with ALL-IN-1.

And remember that dec's X.400 product replaced Message Router (an MTA)
not the user agents (ALL-IN-1 and the VMS MAIL low end basic product)

While read receipts were somewhat added with SMTP, it was never
"officialy" supported by all agents and not a function you can rely on.


> And I don't really care if 
> the mail was opened or not. 

You've obviously never worked in an organisation with a working mail
system that supported read receipts.

> Agreed that it wasn't until 1992 that internet became "commercial". 
> However, at that point, there was really no alternative around anymore. 

Had the government push for standard protocols to connect machines from
different vendors happened a couple years later, IP would likely have
become the standard, but there are likely have been many official
extensions to stuff like SMTP, FTP etc to support each vendor's
proprietary extensions. (for instance, VMS RMS or MVS dataset attributes
supported by any unix system, not just text line end conversions)