[TUHS] Berkeley CSRG Building

[Eric Allman via TUHS]

On 2024-08-16 17:47, George Michaelson wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, 17 Aug 2024, 7:08 am Eric Allman via TUHS, <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
>     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 "tuhs at org.tuhs" <mailto:tuhs at org.tuhs>. And the
>     compiled in configuration that delivermail used was becoming
>     unwieldy as the world get bigger, hence a configuration file.
>
>     eric
>
>
> 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 at host 
> left to right it meant in principle the channel for faroffia was found 
> faster from a shorter index token starting from 0.

Ah yes, I was trying to remember JANET but was too lazy to do the research.

Honestly, I thought that JANET got it right and the rest of us 
different, so that:

user at top.middle.bottom (e.g., eric at edu.berkeley.cs)

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

uunet!foo!bar at berkeley.edu

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

host::user at decwrl.com

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.

>
> Jim at, Leeds uni and then heriot-watt wrote the sendmail.cf 
> <http://sendmail.cf> to dis-un-combobulate uk.ac <http://uk.ac> to 
> ac.uk <http://ac.uk> 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.
>
> G

Heh. It reminds me of some of Teus Hagen's escapades in the early days. 
But Teus was earlier, when networking meant UUCP.

eric
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