[269] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: pointless bickering
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ralph E. Droms)
Mon Mar 4 12:00:57 1991
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 91 11:43:32 EST
From: droms@sol.bucknell.edu (Ralph E. Droms)
To: dan@sci.ccny.cuny.edu
Cc: emv@ox.com, jsq@tic.com, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Dan Schlitt's message of Mon, 4 Mar 91 09:54:54 -0500 <9103041454.AA21084@sci.ccny.cuny.edu>
Reply-To: droms@bucknell.edu
I've been trying to stay out of this, too ... here's my two cents:
Perhaps the BITNET vs. Internet question can be expanded to ask: Why
does the Internet only support telnet, ftp and e-mail? (I'm obviously
exaggerating [only a little!] to make a point...) Why haven't
applications supporting functions like those provided by LISTSERV been
developed or installed or accepted?
My opinion is that the diversity and level of expertise (perhaps
"tolerance"?) of the Internet community has actually stifled
development of new distributed applications. As I undestand, there
are only a few types of installations on BITNET (mostly IBM, some
VAX/VMS and UNIX [please, no flames if I'm way off base - I admit to
having an Internet-centric viewpoint]). MIT has a distributed
user-message delivery system (whose name I can't remember - sorry),
but it has not been installed on enough Internet hosts to achieve
critical mass. Developing and installing an Internet distributed
application will be much more difficult because of the wide range of
operating systems and hardware that the application must be ported to.
WRT to level of tolerance - as long as anonymous FTP is "good enough",
no one is going to bother developing a friendlier interactive
interface or an e-mail front end.
Dan Schlitt writes:
A listserver RFC working
group sounds like an excellent idea. And let us not engage in freeping
creaturism. LISTSERV may try to do too many things all at once. There may
be several separate services instead of just one.
Perhaps a new group (part of or in parallel with the group that is
listing and documenting existing users services) could spawn off
several work items like a list server, a front-end for anonymous ftp,
etc. Be careful when you make suggestions like that, you might get
volunteered for the job...
- Ralph Droms Computer Science Department
droms@bucknell.edu 323 Dana Engineering
Bucknell University
(717) 524-1145 Lewisburg, PA 17837
