--On Saturday, October 28, 2017 06:48 -0700 ned+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > In the case of email, the central problem was the actual > protocol design was at odds with reality. > > Implementing X.400 was expensive and tedious, but we managed. > Passing the various required conformance tests was even more > tedious, and occasionally nasty because there were a number of > cases where the tests were flat-out wrong, and getting the > testing folks to look at what the standards actually said was > difficult. (It was generally easier to implement options to > break our implementation.) > > But real nightmware was deployment and trying to achieve > interoperability. That basically never happened. > > I still remember the day I realized that the X.400 had failed. > It was at a EMA meeting discussing how to make the file > transfer body part do something useful. The chair passed > around a sign-up sheet, but as he did so said something like, > "Be sure to put down your Internet address; most of X.400 > addresses you folks provided last time didn't work." > > When you've botched things to the point where a room full of > experts in the field cannot even manage to write down a > working address, you're toast. I figured it out with X.400 when I was working with a couple of the responsible standards organizations and discovered that they were using Internet mail, or proprietary systems that were connected/ gatewayed to Internet mail, and not X.400. When asked why and what their transition plan was, they had no answers to the second and were not even uncomfortable about the first. Lots of reasons... and a sad story but one that ultimately benefited the Internet in multiple ways. john