Newsgroup: uk.net

In article <1991Nov19.131905.7031@newcastle.ac.uk> Phil.Watson@newcastle.ac.uk (Phil Watson (x7789)) writes:
[...]
>BTW, i was under the impression that with the internet (which seems to have
>now arrived in the UK), the computer sending the mail would give it directly
>to the destination computer.  I seem to remember this happening with some
>of the computers i was working on in oz, email to a computer in the US (that
>was also on the internet) took less than 5 minutes.  It does seem a bit
>stupid that my email to oz currently goes through various gateways and often
>gets lost when i can telnet to oz, ftp my message, and mail it locally !!.
>What's the reason for still using the gateways ?, as you can probably tell,
>i ain't a nework guru (just curious :-) !.

The reason is political rather than technical.  The internet protocol 
whereby "the computer sending the mail would give it directly to the 
destination computer" - as you phrase it - is called SMTP.

The following is an excerpt form R. A. Day, "Overview of the JANET IP 
Service and of Requirements for Connection", Joint Network Team  16 
October 1991:

| 1.3.  Unacceptable Services and Protocols
| 
| The use of the services and/or protocols  in  the  following  list  is
| regarded as unacceptable over the JIPS:
| 
|         SMTP;
| 	  ^^^^
|         NFS;
|         Use of IP to carry OSI application protocols;
|         Use of mixed lower layers (eg DECNET over IP).
| 
| The use of these services has been strongly discouraged by the ISC, on
| the grounds either of potential for fragmentation of existing services
| based upon Coloured Books, of reasons of performance, or of  potential
| to impede the progress towards the transition of JANET to OSI.

Of course similar arguments were used for not allowing, until this year,
JANET to carry Internet IP packets providing Internet connectivity...

Diomidis
-- 
Diomidis Spinellis                  Internet:                 dds@doc.ic.ac.uk
Department of Computing             UUCP:                    ...!ukc!icdoc!dds
Imperial College, London SW7        #include "/dev/tty"

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