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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2024-08-16 17:47, George Michaelson
wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:CAKr6gn0aKMZouzGLP9JDcPqmYn5bhcKuGasaOz2xkrqGHw1rSA@mail.gmail.com">
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<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, 17 Aug 2024, 7:08 am
Eric Allman via TUHS, <<a href="mailto:tuhs@tuhs.org"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">tuhs@tuhs.org</a>>
wrote:<br>
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<p>Don't forget DECnet (host::user) and things like some
mercifully dead UK network that reversed the domain
names, so this mailing list would be <a
href="mailto:tuhs@org.tuhs" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer" moz-do-not-send="true">"tuhs@org.tuhs"</a>.
And the compiled in configuration that delivermail used
was becoming unwieldy as the world get bigger, hence a
configuration file.<br>
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<p>eric</p>
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<div dir="auto">Steve Kille famously said on the JANET (for that
was the network) uk mail list for mail of the UK.ac decision
"its research and its ok to experiment" - the main advantage
was clarity of the scoping to which element to look at going
to far off faroffia: it was the rightmost element in the
token list for you normal people and the leftmost for us.
Since we are western alphabet and alrwsdy parsing the
user@host left to right it meant in principle the channel for
faroffia was found faster from a shorter index token starting
from 0.</div>
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<p>Ah yes, I was trying to remember JANET but was too lazy to do the
research.</p>
<p>Honestly, I thought that JANET got it right and the rest of us
different, so that:</p>
<p> <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:user@top.middle.bottom">user@top.middle.bottom</a> (e.g., <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:eric@edu.berkeley.cs">eric@edu.berkeley.cs</a>)</p>
<p>would allow strict left-to-right parsing. Actually I wanted
cs.berkeley.edu:eric — if that was true everywhere, sendmail would
have been so much easier. A major reason for very generic
rewriting rules is that basic parsing algorithms (notably LALR(1))
couldn't be made generic. At Berkeley</p>
<p> <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:uunet!foo!bar@berkeley.edu">uunet!foo!bar@berkeley.edu</a></p>
<p>meant that the message should be sent to the UUCP host (ucbvax at
the time, iirc, which from Ing70 translated to
"ucbvax:uunet!foo!bar"), but</p>
<p> <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:host::user@decwrl.com">host::user@decwrl.com</a></p>
<p>should be sent to decwrl unchanged. See the book "!%@:: A
directory of Electronic Mail Addressing & Networks" for a
taste of just how bad it was.<br>
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<div dir="auto">Jim at, Leeds uni and then heriot-watt wrote the
<a href="http://sendmail.cf" moz-do-not-send="true">sendmail.cf</a>
to dis-un-combobulate <a href="http://uk.ac"
moz-do-not-send="true">uk.ac</a> to <a href="http://ac.uk"
moz-do-not-send="true">ac.uk</a> which obviously many many
sysadmins in the UK ran with. He was really meant to be doing
functional programming research I think. We shared an office
for a few months at Leeds, it was ex English school and
reputedly where Tolkien sat out his days before Cambridge came
good. Leeds could have taken free(ish) mail from York on x25
and preferred to dial the Heriot-Watt in edinburgh to get
uucp. Acoustic coupler modem days. I think has they known,
Charles Forsyth in York would have done uucp over Janet /x25
but people sometimes do the other thing, not because it's hard
but just because.</div>
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<div dir="auto">G</div>
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<p>Heh. It reminds me of some of Teus Hagen's escapades in the early
days. But Teus was earlier, when networking meant UUCP.</p>
<p>eric<br>
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