On Mon, Feb 4, 2019 at 8:43 PM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote: oops. Hit the list limit. Posters like this: https://people.freebsd.org/~imp/20190203_215836.jpg which show just how over-specified it was. I also worked at The Wollongong Group back in the early 90's and it was a total dog on the SysV 386 machines that we were trying to demo it on. A total and unbelievable PITA to set it up, and crappy performance once we got it going. Almost bad enough that we didn't show it at the trade show we were going to.... And that was just the lower layers of the stack plus basic name service. x.400 email addresses were also somewhat overly verbose. In many ways, it was a classic second system effect because they were trying to fix everything they thought was wrong with TCP/IP at the time without really, truly knowing the differences between actual problems and mere annoyances and how to properly weight the severity of the issue in coming up with their solutions. So x.400 vs smtp mail addresses: "G=Warner;S=Losh;O=WarnerLoshConsulting;PRMD=bsdimp;A=comcast;C=us" vis "imp(a)bsdimp.com" (assuming I got all the weird bits of the x.400 address right, it's been a long time and google had no good examples on the first page I could just steal...) The x.400 addresses were so unwieldy that a directory service was added on top of them x.500, which was every bit as baroque IIRC. TP4 might not have been that bad, but all the stuff above it was kinda crazy... Warner