Patrick_A_Townson@cup.portal.com (09/10/88)
You didn't ignore my message! Quite a large number of replies were in my email at PORTAL this evening. Here is a summary of the most interesting messages I received -- Bill Wisner noted, "Rumor has it that PORTAL's mailer is broken." He went on to castigate SUN for some of the confusion regards our mail. I forwarded his message intact to Phil Sih, our sysadmin for his review. Matthew P. Weiner, aka Weemba@Garnet called my attention to the UUCP Mapping Project. I had not known of their efforts previously. Thanks for bringing it up. He also stated that the problems with mail on this end were Portal's fault. Brian Kantor, a Postmaster at UCSD Office of Academic Computing, aka "The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd" referred me to the RFC-822 specifications and offered to teleport a complete set to me if desired. No thank you, it is quite lengthy, and I have the most pertinent parts available to me from a local source here in Chicago. George Zipperlen, aka Hyper Wizard said that the mnemonics of domain addresses were helpful. He noted it was far easier to remember these words than to remember numbers, area codes and zip codes which he was always forgetting. Well, that goes to show the difference in people. I find it quite hard to remember the mnemonics unless they are extremely obvious and directly related to the site name I am writing. On the other hand, I can remember 10 digit phone numbers from years ago. I have I suppose a three or four dozen complete telephone numbers from all over the United States stored away in my memory. You name an area code I can tell you almost always exactly where it is, etc.... Amos Shapir, writing from Israel said, "You are obviously new here. Not many people write 200 line messages and even fewer read them...." Actually I have been 'around here' for about a year, and the message, at least by the line count at PORTAL was 122 lines. Anyway, there are plenty of people who write 200 line messages: just scan through talk.politics.misc and talk. religion.misc. Talk about Sunday sermons! And those guys use 198 lines of quotes from prior messages and 2 lines of original reply. At least all 122 lines were my own thoughts, thank you! Amos also pointed out that a central data base was located at Rutgers.edu and a similar data base for Arpa and Internet was located at SRI-NIC. Steve Bellovin@att.research hastened to tell me "not everyone thinks that all the users at PORTAL are isomorphic.." and he reminisced about early days on the net and how 'projections called for 1 or 2 messages daily from perhaps a hundred sites at most..." And may I venture to add I think by 1990 you all will be remembering the 'good old days' of 1987-88; but that's to be expected with the rapid growth of modems at home and public access systems. Finally Jordan Brown noted in his opinion that names were really superior to numbers. He pointed out that conversion to a number address, even if it were desirable, would be a nightmare to implement given so many varieties of machinery and software. He doubted such a conversion would ever be successful. Jordan also suggested I review the RFC-822 stuff. My thanks to all for your replies. Contrary to Amos Shapir's comments that 'not many will read 200 line messages', the fact is my email box at PORTAL was full to the brim Friday evening, and I suspect there will be more over the weekend. An additional summary will follow if the mail received in the next few days differs substantially in content from that already received. Patrick Townson@cup.portal.com