Tony Hansen wrote:
I was talking with someone in the past year or so who had been traveling
in southeast Asia. They experienced email on a totally different level:
it was dependent on a router being brought in to the area by a shared
traveling router. When the router was nearby, email flowed smoothly. But
until the router came back around on its weekly journey (carried on an
elephant, no less), the email had to be stored up before its final
delivery. Email definitely required delay-tolerant store and forward
processing.
Hadn't heard of that DTN example although some researchfield-monitoring
scenarios are close.
The SMTP TRN (now ETRN) came out of our experience with CSNet's dial-up site
access (phonenet) relaying to the Arpanet/Internet. At one of the late-stage
meetings that was designing SMTP, I mentioned this requirement for being
connected occasionally and needing to pick up queued mail, as well as sending
it. When the remote site controlled the connection -- e.g., to save phone costs
-- the other side would not know that it could initiate an SMTP push to the
remote site. Hence [E]TRN.
One of the fun example of Vint Cerf's talent was his immediately grasping the
need to be able to explain the need for this, to funding agencies. He was
working at Arpa at the time and almost instantly said... submarines!
Actually, the most interesting thing is to hear that there are still some real
work tasks for elephants. In Thailand I'd heard that since they weren't needed
for logging, entertaining tourists was the only thing keeping them alive...
d/
ps. a skeptic would note that your example doesn't explicitly state that the
MTA-level is multi-hop, although I suppose there are MTAs on both sides of the
occasional connection?
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)irtf(_dot_)org
https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg