Re: ideas getting shot down

[Eliot Lear <lear at cisco.com>]

Paul Vixie wrote:
> utk-mail11 may have seemed to you like a way to extend the internet, but
> to the greybeards of the time who had crapped upon bitnet and uucp, decnet
> mail11 (for example, DECWRL.ENET.DEC.COM) was an abuse of the MX RR, not a
> "good way" to use the technology.  

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.  
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.

Regards,

Eliot

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