Subject: Re: ideas getting shot down

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:24:40 -0400

--On Wednesday, 19 September, 2007 19:42 +0200 Eliot Lear
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> Here our views of history differ.  I can't say that I had a
> gray beard at the time, nor that I was at all involved in the
> design, but I was there, and I think there was something of a
> view that the whole point of MXes was for the MX relay to
> bridge between online and offline devices.

As well as to intermittently or poorly-connected Internet
devices (the notion of backup via a host that was more able to
dependably reach the destination was well-understood too).

>  It was well
> understood at the time that MANY more systems were in fact on
> the networks that you mentioned than were on the ARPANET.  And
> I would even argue that there MXes solved a major problem,
> which was that there was that sites that sat on both UUCP and
> the Internet often times  Got It Wrong with regard to the
> precedence of "!".  The abstraction that MX provided made
> relaying behavior much more explicit.  I think this was
> understood at the time.

Very well understood by just about everyone involved, often by
everyone on both sides of the gateways.  It is also the reason
why wild-card MXs ("route to this machine to reach all sites in
that university or country") were so important.

     john

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