On Wed, 13 Jul 1994 Jueneman(_at_)gte(_dot_)com wrote:
The DUA I am presently using evaluating, InfoBroker 1.0 from DEC, [...]
[...nice description of graphical interface deleted...]
While trendy, this does demonstrate one of the problems I've always had with
X.400/X.500. And that is: to get a minimal system you have to go to an
awful lot of trouble and have to assume the user has certain kinds of
equipment or network connectivity.
(X.440 stuff deleted.)
If the minimal requirement for certificate search and management for PEM
is a graphical user agent in an age when the Unix command-line is still
king then deployment will, I believe, naturally be slow. That doesn't
rule out a curses based user interface for certificate management of course,
but such an interface doesn't currently fit in well with the existing
Internet mail systems. Result: we need to rewrite much of the existing
software just so we can get PEM functionality in a friendly fashion.
It takes time to reinvent the wheel to use a different kind of nut.
I think we have a MAJOR disconnect here, for I totally disagree with your
characterization of the current users of the Internet. Maybe that is the way
people do things in Australia, but I think that it is far from the norm with
respect to the potential users of PEM. At least in the US, the major e-mail
packages tend to be commercial offerings such as cc:mail and others, primarily
operating over LANs via gateways. Using a pure SMTP package is relatively
uncommon for the vast majority of e-mail users. And almost no one uses dial up
access, except for people on the road. Even there, protocols like SLIP and PPP
are beginning to dominate.
In no way would I consider myself to be an Internet guru -- I just don't have
the time or energy to deal with all of the innovations coming out. But I use a
package with a fairly decent MIME interface, I have several DUAs running using
commercial packages, I am learing to navigate using Mosaic, and I steadfastly
REFUSE to use any UNIX system that forces me to learn an arcane command
language with greps and awk and curses, etc. I can't stand to use the UNIX mail
interface on our mail host (that's a major reason why I haven't gotten on board
the TIS PEM system), so I use an STMP server for outgoing messages, and a POP3
client for inbound messages. I would use an SMTP client and server, but I can't
force the remote server to send me mail at my convenience, so I use the pull
model with some distaste.
And by the way, this is all running on a now-almost obsolete Toshiba 3200SXC
portable at home, running Windows on a paltry 16MHz 386, accessing my mail
server and various files on my offfice machine via FTP and/or NFS, retrieving
news groups, etc., while running over a 14,400 bps FAX modem that gives almost
as good performance as I get over the 10 mbps Ethernet LANin the office (we
have some performance problems that a new routerized network is supposed to
solve.) I'm not bragging -- as I said I consider myself to be somewhat of a
late adopter of some of this technology, as it isn't my primary field of work.
I just use it to get my job done.
I could understand if you said you were having problems getting X Windows to
run, or if some of the Windows or Macintosh applications didn't have quite the
finese you would like. But to be stumbling around using a 1970's command line
interface to UNIX in this day and age blows my mind.
For that matter, you don't even have to have your own X.500 DUA. Lots of DSAs
offer an LDAP server with an interface to Mosaic, so that the directory simply
appears to be a document. Limited search capabilities are supported, but they
are good enough. The University of Michigan and the University of Texas have
almost 180,000 users on X.500 between them, and more than half are accessing
X.500 via Mosaic for a simple point and shoot interface.
Meanwhile, PGP leaps ahead. It may use e-mail addresses which aren't
scaleable to the entire universe, but it is beating us silly. In the
end, it may be easier to bolt a scaleable naming system onto PGP when
the user community finally feels the need for it.
It may be widely used in Europe and in the academic community, but it has seen
very little use in the hundreds of thousand or even millions of commercial
e-mail users. so I wouldn't worry so much who is ahead in the very early
polling results, but rather who is leading in the major markets.
There is a time to panic, but I don't think it's here yet. What we should panic
about, however, is the perception that is beginning to set in among the
uninvolved observers that the PEM community is badly in disarray, and the
product is dying for lack of acceptance. That could become an unwarranted but
self-fulfilling prophecy. I think that the time has certainly come to close
ranks, fix whatever needs to be fixed, and (especially) to develop some
non-UNIX based implementations that will be more user friendly. I for one can't
wait to see what Sead Muftic will be releasing shortly.
(Sorry if I came on too strong. I didn't mean to kill the messenger. But I
think that it is important to count the number of users on various platforms
and make marketing decisions based on those facts. And UNIX clearly doesn't
have the numbers, and probably never will, and if its character-oriented
approach is one of the major problems, it should be recognized as such.)
Bob