X.400 / was Re: ftp archives disappearing?

[Brent Hilpert]

Andrew Back wrote:
> 
> Well, X.400 still gets used in certain applications. I think the UK
> military use it a lot, and gets used for transporting EDI messages between
> in supply chain stuff. Also the basis for the Air Traffic Services (ATS)
> Message Handling Services used in ground-ground comms between airports to
> exchange flight plans etc. This is new, actively developed and not legacy.

Interesting, I had no idea .. thought everything X.400 was buried in dust by now.

FWIW, the project I worked on was the first X.400 implementation. We were
'on the air' in 1983 or 84. There was a near-simultaneous completely independant
development at (IIRC) KDD in Japan (an R&D arm of NTT) and in 1984 we successfully
transferred messages between the two systems (X.25 network layer) with a
minimum of fixing required.

Our system received a lot of attention in Europe as they were focussed on
international standard protocols at that time. I saw a presentation in Italy
in 1987 from DEC about their just- (or about-to-be-) released X.400 system.

There was some consideration (or at least lip-service) in that era being given
to changing the mail transfer protocol on the Internet to X.400.
In 1987 I was asked on short notice to attend an Internet meeting/conference at
Stanford to speak on our experience with X.400. Maybe if I had given a better
presentation we'd all be using X.400 now instead of SMTP.