gnu@hoptoad.UUCP.UUCP (07/13/86)
Good luck at this. The problem is that the national standards organizations make money by selling copies of these standards. They will not let the technical committees just post them to the net or drop them somewhere for anonymous FTP. This has been an ongoing problem in the ANSI C standardization effort. Happily the IEEE P1003 committee developing a standard for "portable operating systems" (they can't call it Unix(TM)) is in favor of electronic media and has been making drafts and discussion available on the net. I suspect the difference is because the IEEE is answerable to its members, while ANSI is answerable to nobody. PS: I was a member of the ANSI/ISO APL language standards committee and it's true that designing a standard by committee is a different job than building a working system/network/etc. The APL committee took pains to seldom engage in "design", but to just adopt the best and most compatible things from a variety of implementations, inventing new ideas only when required to make everything consistent. Looking from the outside, it seems like the ISO standards folks are building a lot of paper designs that aren't implemented until after the standard is approved. Anyone who ever tried to write a program from its specs, without revising the specs based on what was learned during implementation, will recognize the problems in this.
jsq@SALLY.UTEXAS.EDU (John Quarterman) (07/16/86)
Brief elaboration on certain points of John Gilmore's message: The X3J11 C Committee (they hate being called ANSI C) has a USENET newsgroup called mod.std.c. It does not appear to be gatewayed to any Internet mailing list. Doubtless the moderator of that newsgroup <std-c@cbosgd.att.com> could elaborate. (The mailing list INFO-C@BRL.ARPA is gatewayed to the different newsgroup net.lang.c.) The IEEE 1003 Portable Operating System for Computer Environments Committee indirectly sponsors the USENET newsgroup mod.std.unix (known in the Internet as the mailing list STD-UNIX@SALLY.UTEXAS.EDU) and many of the committee members read it. I'm the moderator and have in the past made on-line copies of drafts of the standard available by anonymous FTP from sally in cooperation with the rest of the committee. The current document is the published Trial Use Standard and is not available on-line, though future drafts probably will be. Actually, according to IEE what is on-line is something that "represents" the draft: the real draft is the paper copy, which you can also get just by getting on a paper mailing list. For details on access to these committees and standards, see recent articles in mod.std.unix, whose archives may be gotten by anonymous FTP from sally.utexas.edu. The current volume is in /pub/mod.std.unix. PS: IEEE 1003.1 is working on adoption by ISO. We'll see how that affects availability of drafts.
Kelley.pa@XEROX.COM (08/09/86)
The X.400 series of documents done in IFIP WG 6.5 contained integrated multi-font text and graphics done on a Xerox Star. They were probably not distributed on the ArpaNet at the time simply because there was no easy way to convert them to a readable message format. Furthermore, there was no other electronic mail list for discussion of the standard by members of the committee because the necessary gateways between the members' electronic mail boxes did not exist. -- kirk