[Info-vax] Rethinking DECNET ?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2014-09-06 23:53, JF Mezei wrote:
> On 14-09-06 16:32, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>
>> 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.

But you do not know that the recipient have read the mail. Only that he 
opened it. Or do you claim to have some plugin to the brain to tell if 
he actually read it?

> 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.

Right.

>> 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.

I think you missed my point. :-)

>> 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)

Not sure what you were trying to say here.
IP did become the standard.

And FTP do have provisions for transporting other types of files than 
the Unix view of the world. When FTP (as well as much else of TCP/IP) 
was invented, Unix was not so dominating it is today. A lot of work was 
actually done on TOPS-20 machines, and guess what. There are some even 
more oddball requirements for TOPS-20 files, which FTP support.

(On TOPS-20, files have a bytesize, and it can be anything from 1 to 36 
bits in a byte... And RMS also existed for TOPS-20...)

I'm right now working on my own TCP/IP for RSX, and I sure as hell am 
going to use the abilities of FTP to allow two RSX systems to transfer 
any kind of file transparently. It's more tricky if you want to pass the 
file on to a system that don't have the abilities, but then again, if 
you transfer magic file formats to a system that don't support them, you 
can expect things to not work out well anyway.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol