Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralized admins hook their sites together.
Did any of the ITU standards win? In the end, internet swallowed telephones and everything is now VOIP. I think the last of the X standards left is X509?
Anyone remember the promise of ATM networking in the 90's? It was telecom grade networking which used circuit switched networking that would handle voice, video and data down one pipe. Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a deterministic network of pipes. You called a computer as if it were a telephone (or maybe that was Datakit?) and ATM handed the user a byte stream like TCP. Imagine never needing an IP stack or setting traffic priority because the network already handles the QoS. Was it simple to deploy? No. Was it cheap? Nooohooohooohooo. Was Ethernet any of those? YES AND YES. ATM was superior but lost to the simpler and cheaper Ethernet which was pretty crappy in its early days (thinnet, thicknet, terminators, vampire taps, AUI, etc.) but good enough.
The funny part is this has the unintended consequences of needing to reinvent the wheel once you get to the point where you need telecom sized/like infrastructure. Ethernet had to adapt to deterministic real-time needs so various hacks and standards have been developed to paper over these deficiencies which is what TSN is - reinventing ATM's determinism. In addition we also now have OTN, yet another protocol to further paper over the various other protocols to mux everything down a big fat pipe to the other end which allows Ethernet (and IP/ATM/etc) to ride deterministically between data-centers.
Without being able to get too into the telco detail, I think the lesson was that hard realtime is both much harder to achieve and not actually needed. People will happily chat over nondeterministic Zoom and Discord.
It's both psychological and slightly paradoxical. Once you let go of saying "the system MUST GUARANTEE this property", you get a much cheaper, better, more versatile and higher bandwidth system that ends up meeting the property anyway.
Seeing that the tech would never be good enough, they sold off the whole thing for cheap. Years later, they bought it back for way, way more money because they desperately needed to get into the cell phone business that was clearly headed to the moon.
I totally understand the pride they had in the reliability of their system, but it turns out that dropped calls just aren't that big of a deal when you can quickly redial and reconnect.
What you need is more that enough bandwidth.
Think of the difference between a highway with few cars versus a highway filled to the brim with cars. In the latter case traffic slows to a crawl even for ambulances.
It seems like it was just cheaper and easier to build more bandwidth than it was to add traffic priority handling to internet connectivity.
Only because they don't even know how a good system feels like
Well, not "happily". (Doesn't every video conference do the "hold on, can you hear me? I have wifi issues" dance every other day?) But it works on a good day.
ATM was nifty if you had a requirement of establishing voice-style, i.e. billable, connections. No thanks. It was an interesting technology but hopelessly hobbled by the desire to emulate a voice call that fit into a standard invoice line.
I think standards are important, and I'm sad that no one bothers anymore, but stuff like this and the inclusion of interlace in digital video for that little 3 year window when it might have mattered does really sour one on the process.
That approach of course didn’t age well when voice almost became a niche application.
There's likely an element of the "layering TCP on TCP" problem going on, too.
The classic popular treatment of the subject is: https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/
When I pointed out in a previous post how much X.400 sucked, even that never got anywhere near X.25. X.25 is the absolute zero on any networking scale, the scale starts with X.25 at -273degC and goes up from there.
however, actually building a functional routing infrastructure that supported QOS was pretty intractable. that was one of several nails in ATMs coffin (I worked a little on the PNNI routing proposal).
edit: I should have admitted that yes, loss does have a relationship to queue depth, but that doesn't result in infinite queues here. it does mean that we have to know the link delay and the target bandwidth and have per-flow queue accounting, which isn't a whole lot better really. some work was done with statistical queue methods that had simpler hardware controllers - but the whole thing was indeed a mess.
Once those requirements dropped down (partially because people just started to accept weird echo) the replacement became MPLS and whatever you can send IP over where Ethernet sometimes shows as package around the IP frame but has little relation to Ethernet otherwise.
For Linux heads, it was doubly annoying, as ATM was not directly supported in the kernel. You had to download a separate patch to compile the necessary modules, then install and run three separate system daemons, all with the correct arguments for our network, just to get a working network device. And of course you had to download all the necessary packages with another computer, since you couldn’t get online yet. This was the early 2000s, so WiFi was not really common yet.
Even once you got online, one of the admins would randomly crash every so often and you’d have to restart to get back online. It was such a pain.
What year was that? I could see a college/university network department dominated by old school telecom guys deciding to use ATM to connect buildings, but it's kind of insane to think anyone at any point in time thought it was reasonable to push to individual endpoints
I worked on a network that used RSVP ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Reservation_Protocol ) to emulate the old circuit-switched topology. It was kinda amazing to see how it could carve guaranteed-bandwidth paths through the network fabric.
Of course, it also never really worked with dynamic routing and brought in tons of complexity with stuck states. In our network, it eventually was just removed entirely in favor of 1gbit links with VLANs for priority/normal traffic.
We just wanted our own stuff. We did not want to coordinate with a proprietary vendor to network or be charged by the byte to do so.
And this sort of checks out, most of the complaints about the internet architecture is when someone starts putting put smart middle boxes in a load bearing capacity and now it becomes hard to deploy new edge devices.
I love this. Ethernet is such shit. What do you mean the only way to handle a high speed to lower speed link transition is to just drop a bunch of packets? Or sending PAUSE frames which works so poorly everyone disables flow control.
It was complete garbage.
Another lab of theirs proudly made a Winsock that would use ATM SVCs instead of TCP and proudly made a brochure extolling their achievement "Web protocol without having to use TCP". Because clearly it was TCP hindering adoption of the Web /s
The Bellhead vs. Nethead was a real thing back then. To paraphrase an old saying about IBM, Telcos think if they piss on something, it improves the flavor.
One of the jobs I had applied out of college was to lead Schengen's central police database (think stolen car reports, arrest warrants etc) which would federate national databases. For some unfathomable reason, they chose X.400 as messaging bus for that replication, and endured massive delays and cost overruns for that reason. I guess I dodged a bullet by not going there.
Of course, the biggest--and weirdest--success of the ITU standards is that the OSI model is still frequently the way networking stacks are described in educational materials, despite the fact that it bears no relation to how any of the networking stack was developed or is used. If you really dig into how the OSI model is supposed to work, one of the layers described only matters for teletypes--which were are a dying, if not dead, technology when the model was developed in the first place.
On the ITU side, they have made improvements including allowing a plain fully qualified domain name as the subject of a certificate, as an alternative to sequence of set of attributes.
X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP
Now I'm young enough not to have seen teletypes in an actual production use setting, but I've never heard anyone suggesting the presentation layer was for teletypes. That's just Google-level FUD.
Have you ever tried to implement an ITU standard from just reading the specs? It's hard. Firstly you have to spend a lot of money just to buy the specs. Then you find the spec is written by somebody who has a proprietary product, and is tiptoeing along a line that reveals enough information to keep the standards body happy (ie, has enough info to make it worthwhile to purchase the specification), and not revealing the secret sauce in their implementation.
I've done it, and it's an absolute nightmare. The IETF RFCs are a breath of fresh air in comparison. Not only can you read the source, there are example implementations!
And if you think that didn't lead to a better outcome, you're kidding yourself. The ITU process naturally leads to a small number of large engineering orgs publishing just enough information so they can interoperate, while keeping enough hidden so the investment discourages the rise of smaller competitors. The result is, even now I can (and do) run my own email server. If the overly complicated bureaucratic ITU standards had won the day, I'm sure email would have been run by a small number of CompuServe like rent seeking parasites for decades.
UPDATE: some say that's because XMPP was too encompassing of a standard (if a format allows to do too much it loses usefulness, like saying that binary files format can store anything). IMO that's not the reason, they could just support they own subset. They scrapped interoperability for competition only IMO.
I don't think that's IETF policy. Individual IETF working groups decide whether to request publication of an RFC, and the availability of open source implementations is a strong argument in favour of publication, but not a hard requirement.
If the IETF standards are sometimes useful, it's more a matter of culture than of policy.
However, I think DER is good (and is better than BER, PER, etc in my opinion). (I did make up a variant with a few additional types, though.)
OID is also a good idea, although I had thought they should add another arc for being based on various kind of other identifiers (telephone numbers, domain names, etc) together with a date for which that identifier is valid (to avoid issues with reassigned identifiers) as well as possibility of automatic delegation for some types (so that e.g. if you register an account on another system then you can get a free OID from it too; there is a bit of difficulty in some cases but it might be possible). (I have written a file about how to do this, although I did not publish it yet.)
The other difference from that era, and even the early internet era, is how much is no longer standardised at all, but decided by global monopolies. Back then it was a given that Everything would at least need to interoperate at the national level. But we may be returning to that .
ISPs and providers (fiber or not) that started out as cable companies (Comcast, Charter) are hitching to SCTE/CableLabs standards and equipment from their traditional vendors (Commscope, wherever Cisco's Scientific Atlanta business lines ended up)
In the US there is little need for interoperability since networks don't have to be unbundled or support any kind of competition, outside of cable networks have to allow a customer to bring their own CPE (and only for copper networks, when they move to fiber all bets are off)
The only benefit interoperability brings is pricing--if a vendor can sell their platform to many ISPs, they get an economy of scale. This doesn't mean standards win, even in the cable world in DOCSIS 4.0 there are two flavors, with Comcast being just about the only company that has picked one flavor, with the rest of the industry picking the other
Besides LDAP and X.509, you've got old standards that were very successful for a while. I'm perhaps a little bit too young for this, but I vaguely remember X.25 practically dominated large-scale networking, and for a while inter-network TCP/IP was often run over X.25. X.25 eventually disappeared because it was replaced by newer technology, but it didn't lose to any contemporary standard.
And if you're looking for new technology, CTAP (X.1278) is a part of the WebAuthn standard, which does seem to be winning.
I'm pretty sure there are other X-standards common in the telco industry, but even if we just look at the software industry, some ITU-T standards won out. This is not to say they weren't complex or that we didn't have simpler alternatives, but sometimes the complex standards does win out. The "worse is better" story is not always true.
The OP article is definitely wrong about this:
> “Of all the things OSI has produced, one could point to X.400 as being the most successful,
There are many OSI standards that are more successful than X.400, by the seer virtue of X.400 being an objective failure. But even putting that aside, there are X-family standards that are truly successful and ubiquitous.X.500 and X.509 are strong contenders, but the real winner is ASN.1 (the X.680/690 family, originally X.208/X.209).
ASN.1 is everywhere: It's obviously present in other ITU-T based standards like LDAP, X.509, CTAP and X.400, but it's been widely adopted outside of ITU-T in the cryptography world. PKCS standards (used for RSA, DSA, ECDSA, DH and ECDH key storage and signatures), Kerberos, S/MIME, TLS. It's also common in some common non-cryptographic protocols like SNMP and EMV (chip and pin and contactless payment for credit cards). Even if your using JOSE or COSE or SSH (which are not based on ASN.1), ASN.1-based PKCS standards are often still used for storing the keys. And this is completely ignoring all the telco standards. ASN.1 is everywhere.
I’ve never been a fan
(Presentation and Session are currently taught in terms of CSS and cookies in HTML and HTTP, respectively. When the web stack became Officially Part of the Officiously Official Network Stack is quite beyond me, and rather implies that you must confound the Web and the Internet in order to get the Correct Layering.)
https://computer.rip/2021-03-27-the-actual-osi-model.html - The Actual OSI Model
> I have said before that I believe that teaching modern students the OSI model as an approach to networking is a fundamental mistake that makes the concepts less clear rather than more. The major reason for this is simple: the OSI model was prescriptive of a specific network stack designed alongside it, and that network stack is not the one we use today. In fact, the TCP/IP stack we use today was intentionally designed differently from the OSI model for practical reasons.
> The OSI model is not some "ideal" model of networking, it is not a "gold standard" or even a "useful reference." It's the architecture of a specific network stack that failed to gain significant real-world adoption.
Maybe X.500 - also known as LDAP, and widely deployed across enterprises in the form of Active Directory.
Using ITU voice codecs!
So it must have been preferable to reduce the workload per email for the server and client.
Another was NIH in considerable important places.
Yet another was that ITU standards promoted use of compilers generating serialization code from schema, and that required having that compiler. One common issue I found out from trying to rescue some old Unix OSI code was that the most popular option in use at many universities was apparently total crap.
In comparison, you could plop a grad student with telnet to experiment with SMTP. Nobody cared that it was shitty, because it was not supposed to be used long. And then nobody wanted to invest in better.
Sounds like a really fast way to kill a network instead of grow it into a 4B daily active user staple like email is today. You'd basically ensure that email would ONLY be spam, because marketers would be the only ones willing spend money to reach people.
Every time I see someone suggest micropayments on HN I have to wonder if people here have any understanding of how actual humans are. Turning every action on your network into a purchase decision is a good way to ensure nobody ever does anything on your network and thus it never becomes a network.
Humans will always gravitate toward the lowest friction way to achieve their goals. So immediately some private company would introduce a free communication channel as a loss leader instead, theirs would grow faster, and then they'd monetize via ads once their network reached critical mass (see also, whatsapp). Killing the more egalitarian decentralized protocol in the process.
My primary goal is not to send e-mail for free -- my primary goal is to have reliable, low-overhead communication with humans. Having this sponsored by spammers is a fine start, but even if I paid a dollar a year or so, that would be much lower overhead than even a day's worth of looking through spam is today (at the rate I value my time -- but even if you value your time orders of magnitudes less, the payoff is there).
If you charge to read, it's hard to build an audience. If you charge to SEND, there's not going to be anything for the audience in the first place.
A two-or-more order-of-magnitude reduction in a problem seems like a good start and a worthwhile step, not something to disregard because it's not 100%…
I doubt it. USPS charges everyone to send snail mail, and I get plenty of spam in my mailbox. I end up with way more spam in my snail mailbox than in my email inbox, since the latter has filtering.
There's obviously a lot of physical waste in this day and age and it's arguably small by comparison, but the paper waste from mail spam still disgusts me.
Funnily enough, if collusion is prohibited, the goal of such a law would be more competition, but the result is more mergers and monopolies, up until the point where antitrust kicks in and ad-hoc limits the monopoly, so each industry ends up with 1 bidder, or 2-3 tops
You might have had an American walled garden, but I don't see this being accepted internationally.
Afraid the spammers will always be with us.
https://jacobfilipp.com/MSJ/1993-vol8/qawindows.pdf
By 1995, the “Internet” e-mail address was the only remaining one.
You could also reach us by knowing our character names on certain MUDs, which implemented a spectrum of “real time IM” to “leave a message with the bot” to “virtual room full of mailboxes which are also rooms and contain objects that are notes”.
I didn’t really use IRC, but everyone else did.
Immutability is one of the best things about email.
that would be very annoying way to write e-mail and no less prone to typosquatting (if anything, more)
Both standards lacked hindsight we have today but x.400 would just be added complexity (as years of tacked-on extensions would build upon it) that makes non-error-prone parsing harder
Its the same reason why fingerd isnt run.
And why the LDAP for an org isnt exposed.
You do not give information of all your users to the public/enemy. Its the cybersecurity "principle of least privilege" and need to know.
SMTP handled routing by piggybacking on DNS. When an email arrives the SMTP server looks at the domain part of the address, does a query, and then attempts transfer it to the results of that query.
Very simple. And, it turns out, immensely scalable.
You don't need to maintain any routing information unless you're overriding DNS for some reason - perhaps an internal secure mail transfer method between companies that are close partners, or are in a merger process.
By contrast X.400 requires your mail infrastructure to have defined routes for other organisations. No route? No transfer.
I remember setting up X.400 connectors for both Lotus Notes/Domino and for Microsoft Exchange in the mid to late 90s, but I didn't do it very often - because SMTP took over incredibly quickly.
An X.400 infrastructure would gain new routes slowly and methodically. That was a barrier to expanding the use of email.
Often X.400 was just a temporary patch during a mail migration - you'd create an artificial split in the X.400 infrastructure between the two mail systems, with the old product on one side and the new target platform on the other. That would allow you to route mails within the same organisation whilst you were in the migration period. You got rid of that the very moment your last mailbox was moved, as it was often a fragile thing...
The only thing worse than X.400 for email was the "workgroup" level of mail servers like MS Mail/cc:Mail. If I recall correctly they could sometimes be set up so your email address was effectively a list of hops on the route. This was because there was no centralised infrastructure to speak of - every mail server was just its own little island. It might have connections to other mail servers, but there was no overarching directory or configuration infrastructure shared by all servers.
If that was the case then your email address would be "johnsmith @ hop1 @ hop2 @ hop3" on one mail server, but for someone on the mail server at hop1 your email address would be "johnsmith @ hop2 @ hop3", and so on. It was an absolute nightmare for big companies, and one of the many reasons that those products were killed off in favour of their bigger siblings.
In the early 90s I implemented a gateway between Novell email and X.400. What amused me the most was X.400 specified an exclusive enumerated list of reasons why email couldn't be delivered, including "recipient is dead". At the X.400 protocol level this was a binary number. SMTP uses a 3 digit number for general category, followed by a free form line of text. Many other Internet standards including HTTP use the same pattern.
It was already obvious at the time that the X.400 field was insufficient, yet also impractical for mail administrators to ensure was complete and correct.
That was the underlying problem with the X.400 and similar where they covered everything in advance as part of the spec, while Internet standards were more pragmatic.
Who can forget addresses like "utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!rms@mit-prep"
1. smtp predates dns. or really even most of the internet. It was originally designed to work over uucp.
2. early smtp used bang paths (remember those) where the route or partial route is baked into the path.
This comment intrigued me so I did a tiny bit of research. It appears that X.400 uses S/MIME for encryption (see RFC-3854). Alternatively something called STANAG 4406 which provides some sort of centralized control of who sees what for military applications.
Neither seems to be "baked in from the start".
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."
https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/galls-law/
In my naive youth I always thought top-down design was the sensible way to build systems. But after witnessing so many of them fail miserably, I now agree with Gall.
Reminds me of IPv6. ;)
Just seeing that X.400 notation is giving me bad memories!
Yes, it is a pain to manage. Yes, it is all still mostly running on 20+-year-old hardware and software.
It is slightly ironic that the main way we communicate X.400 addresses between parties is through modern email.
I see that Wikipedia claims that "X.400 is quite widely implemented[citation needed], especially for EDI services", and that might once have been the case - but I doubt it was particularly widespread even at the time that article was first written. It's worth noting that that [citation needed] tag dates from October 2008!
- poor Internet fit, assuming managed, trusted networks - some promises depended on all participating systems behaving honestly
- once a message reaches another server, you cannot guarantee it isn't copied, backed up, or logged
- X.400 read receipts: more reliable but also more privacy invasive
- X.400 metadata: carries a lot of routing, classification, and organizational info leading to potential privacy leaks
- SMTP is ugly but observable, you don't need a standard specialist to debug issues
Compared to that, when I implemented RFC821/822 (i.e. SMTP) mail, the hardest part was the weird line-encodings, but other than that, the spec was ___so___ nicely readable and pragmatic.
For example from 2023: X.1095: Entity authentication service for pet animals using telebiometrics
Not even then, when people with access to computers were probably in the thousands, would anyone liked to type "C=no; ADMD=; PRMD=uninett; O=uninett; S=alvestrand; G=harald" just like in the example of the article.
Some examples from the article:
> You could have messaged an entire organization or department
This is a mailing list.
> So it was possible, say, for one implementation of X.400 to offer X.400 features like recalling a message, in theory at least, when such guarantees would fail as soon as messages left their walled garden. But “they couldn't buck the rules of physics,” Borenstein concluded. Once a message reached another server, the X.400 implementations could say that an email was recalled or permanently deleted, but there was no way to prove that it hadn’t been backed up surreptitiously.
This is a feature that (1) is in the spec, and also (2) is impossible to implement. That's not a real feature. It's a bug in the spec.
> You don’t email with X.400 today. That is, unless you work in aviation, where AMHS communications for sharing flight plans and more are still based on X.400 standards (which enables, among other things, prioritizing messages and sending them to the tower at an airport instead of a specific individual).
This is... also a mailing list. There's nothing difficult about having an email address for the tower. That email could go to one person, or many people. What's the difference supposed to be? What "feature" are we saying X.400 has that email didn't start with?
> This is a mailing list.
The way I understand it, the layering is different. In X.400, multicasting was a feature of the protocol. An SMTP mailing list, on the other hand, is an endpoint that terminates a protocol transaction, and then initiates one transaction for each final recipient.
I guess it boils down to where it is preferable to have the extra complexity: the ITU-T protocols invariably prefer to put it inside the network, while the Internet protocols prefer to put it at the endpoints. The SMTP protocol is simple, and therefore the mailing list software needs to be complex.
I wish someone would write some RFCs and e-mail could get an update.
X.400 was an “all things, to all men” solution; kinda like TIFF, for images.
I worked on an X.400 product, that never got out of the crib.
You could do things like specify the route that the email took, which was important, because there was support for microtransactions, all along the way. You could do things like pay extra for “premium delivery,” and “registered”-like messages.
It was really crazy. It did work, though.
The issue with specs like that, however, is they only ever get partially implemented. If you have an infrastructure, composed of many partial steps, it can be a mess.
That would have required a lot of changes to computing history beyond simply email, and I doubt many of them would have been improvements.
Thanks to email security scanners this feature is largely broken.
And so are single click to unsubscribe links. So much so that we have to put our unsubscribe page behind a captcha.
rant over