Before the web it was possible to be on a different network and still exchange
email. It did not work at all well but it did work sorta.
Even though the web did in theory work on other protocols (I ran a server on
HEPNET) most of the content was on the Internet.
So there was a different value proposition when someone proposed getting an
Internet connection. People could no longer be fobbed off with 'The JANET
gateway already allows you to exchange mail with the Internet, its cloured
books for you until we deploy OSI'.
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Burger [mailto:eburger(_at_)cantata(_dot_)com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2006 8:06 AM
To: John C Klensin; Dave Crocker; ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: SMTP compared to IM (Re: DNS Choices: Was:
[ietf-dkim] Re: Last Call: 'DomainKeys)
Actually, as I fuzzily recall in the 1986 - 1992-ish period,
MCImail had a large presence for business messaging and
CompuServe had a lion's share of consumer messaging.
Before the flames go on, realize that (1) my memory is fuzzy
and (2) the market was seriously fractured. The large
enterprise market was doing the Notes thing; the small
enterprise market was doing the cc:mail, netware, etc. thing,
and interoperability was something that people gave lip service to.
What a difference five years made! By 1996, pretty much
everyone interoperated with Internet Mail.
On 11/26/06 10:35 PM, "John C Klensin" <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com> wrote:
--On Friday, 24 November, 2006 10:30 -0500 Eric Burger
<eburger(_at_)cantata(_dot_)com> wrote:
Or, the reality that with (at the time) a single dominant network
provider made the inter-networking point moot.
Eric, you are being a little cryptic, perhaps unintentionally.
What do you mean about a single dominant provider and at what time?
I would add an observation to Dave's about possibly
different sets of
needs by reminding everyone that considerable IM
functionality (other
than presence) isn't new. We had SEND/SOML/SAML from the
beginning of
SMTP, even though they had, IMO, a very short practical
lifespan and,
even then, were used only in limited communities. We also we had a
couple of flavors of the "talk" protocol which were
certainly heavily
used in some places. "Talk" involved a conversational
session while
SEND et al was closer to what we would call a short message service
today. Off the Internet and in the land of BITNET/EARN/etc., there
was also an end to end short message protocol and mechanism
that was
extensively used.
None of these supported a presence mechanism in the sense that we
understand it today. As a result, one had to bind a user
identity to
a target host in much the way SMTP does, rather than having someone
attach to the network at any point and announce presence and,
implicitly, location. It is arguably those presence and mobility
mechanisms and not IM itself that is the recent
development. To the
degree to which those mechanisms are what caused IM to take off,
perhaps that reinforces Dave's view of different services serving
different needs.
john
On 11/22/06 11:13 AM, "Dave Crocker" <dhc2(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> wrote:
Harald Alvestrand wrote:
There were no alternatives to SMTP on an IP network
until Instant
Messaging came along.
not since X.400 over X.25 died, no. I thought you were
older than
that....
And there were all of the individual providers that
Michael cited,
such as MCI Mail.
but can be seen in IM, and may likely show up in other
forms of
communication. Much of this is simply the nature of software.
It has nothing to do with software and everything to do with
architecture. IM networks have less problems because all the
participants share a relationship with the IM service providers.
It *is* interesting that the diversity of disconnected email
services was viewed as a basic problem to solve, whereas
most of the
Internet user community does not seem to feel the same
pressure to
unify IM.
Hmmm. Maybe IM satisfies a different set of needs than
does email.
So we had better be a bit cautious about trying to generalize
implications between them.
d/
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