Evan Prodromou
Commercial and consumer email was not always federated.
In the early 90s, businesses had local area network emails like Banyan Vines, MS Mail, or Novell NetWare.
In private life, people used online services like Compuserve, AOL, or local BBSes.
Internet email was an optional feature of some systems, usually difficult to get or use.
There were competing standards for messaging, like X.400.
Then, it all became SMTP-enabled.
It all happened very fast.
Gradually then all at once.
mcneely
@evan what does SMTP have to do with centralization? Or do you mean it was just the standard that became dominant.
Evan Prodromou
@mcneely it was the standard that brought all those consumer and business networks together.
Metcalfe's Law made the combined email internetwork much, much more valuable to everyone.
Evan Prodromou
@harishpillay right. But we often talk about email by following the historical lines back through the earliest days of the Internet.
We forget that a huge amount of electronic messaging in the late 80s and early 90s wasn't on the Internet at all.
Connecting these systems wasn't obviously useful at first. A lot of people fought it, for various reasons.
Harish Pillay
@evan that's a good timeline. I've been using email/smtp to explain activitypub and notion of decentralized. Decentralized was how the Internet started and has to continue to be. It should be all about protocols not platforms.
Evan Prodromou
@tforcworc how is that relevant?
jon crowcroft
@evan though we had smtp-uucp relays in the early 80s, no?
TheCityDweller :verified_gay:
@evan Those systems were for another purpose. It was inner office corporate communication replacing the paper folders being distributed by employees hired for this.
One of the reasons all that X.somehing and OSI model weren't successful was that ITU backed them. Slow, hierarchical organization with a high cost for everything. Just look at the SS7 mess.
The system around RFCs and decentralized consensus finding was the win of IETF etc over ITU.
Evan Prodromou
@toor they were messaging systems with a limited audience due to organizational boundaries.
Jack Coates 🐀
@evan indeed… but interesting how that federation is unraveling now in the US as more and more email moves to the google/Microsoft duopoly
Evan Prodromou
@puercomal not for my purposes, no.
I'm drawing an analogy between the rapid email federation of the mid-1990s and potential social network federation of the present day.
Jack Coates 🐀
@evan I see that and agree, I’m noting that the network does not settle into a single state. Federated and centralized each have attractions.
Evan Prodromou
@puercomal absolutely! I think Metcalfe's Law pushes us along a progression from disconnected -> federated -> monopoly. There is different work to be done at different steps!
Evan Prodromou
Business messaging systems had bridges, both between companies and within departments of companies.
Consumer systems like AOL and Compuserve were very much working towards monopolies. That was part of the plan.
TheCityDweller :verified_gay:
@evan it's Mostly they didn't have the concepts of domains which would have made them - distributed. It didn't scale.
And if they had there was no possibility to route messages or every node would have needed to know about all others.
And: something like Facebook or Twitter which actually does this (central repository all data and users) were not possible back then due to resource limitations. The distributed model was inevitable because of that for email.
Evan Prodromou
@starrwulfe I love this!
JLGatewood
Evan Prodromou
@apodoxus email's not dying.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/456500/daily-number-of-e-mails-worldwide/
Sunflower Björnskalle 🌻
@evan And now it's dying with Google at the point of "Extend" in Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
Evan Prodromou
@bobwyman I am not at all!
I think one fallacy we have about federated communications systems is that they all started with federation. This is untrue!
Few of us can remember when telephone systems were not federated, but many of us can remember when email was not.
Most adults today were around when proprietary text message systems that only allowed messaging within network gave way to SMS.
Federation takes work. It's not obvious. It can happen fast.
Bob Wyman
@evan
Some of those messaging systems taught us nothing. They came and went, leaving no trace. But, ASN.1, an X.400 component, lives on in every mobile phone on the planet, in cryptographic certificates, etc. ASN.1 inspired Googles' protobufs and now CBOR. Even JSON looks like ASN.1's textual representation.
Don't be too quick to dismiss the value of the battles we fought back in the 80's.
Evan Prodromou
@bobwyman TIL!
Bob Wyman
@evan
Back in the 1980's, I was Product Manager for DEC's ALL-IN-1 office automation product. At one point we had 45+% marketshare and were the most commonly used commercial email client. However, a key element of ALL-IN-1 was that it could be extended and customized. Thus, an ALL-IN-1 email client could use just about any email protocol -- or all of them.. As a result, there were many companies that kept ALL-IN-1 running well into the 1990's, even if only to handle email system interchange.
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