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From: guy@gorodish.Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.std.misc,comp.mail.misc,comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Standardizing Email?
Message-ID: <64445@sun.uucp>
Date: 16 Aug 88 19:52:49 GMT
References: <788@vsi.UUCP> <1380@cloud9.UUCP> <3437@phri.UUCP> <20063@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
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> jrmacmillan@watdragon.waterloo.edu writes:
>    Keep in mind that they don't really have much choice; if they come up
>    with something and then "you stupid Americans" do it differently, they
>    are essentially steam-rollered into changing.
> 
> How is that?  RFC821 and RFC822 are dated August 1982, which predates
> (I believe) X.400.

I think the problem here is that Mr. MacMillan completely misunderstood the
comment from Andy Freeman:

	|Does anyone how Europe's bold leap into the 60s a couple of summers
	|ago came out?  (ISO was advertising an experimental mail system
	|between dissimilar hosts, probably based on an X.400 predecessor.  We
	|stupid Americans had been doing that for years.)

Mr. Freeman's comment wasn't that "we stupid Americans" had somehow
"steam-rollered" Europe into picking up something that we "did differently".
His comment was that "we stupid Americans" had come up with a mail system that
worked between dissimilar hosts, long before ISO had ever done so - in fact,
the Arpanet supported this *before* the advent of RFC821 and RFC822 - and that
*ISO* had "done it differently".

The result may well be some "steam-rollering" to get the SMTP users to change,
thus somewhat *reversing* the situation Mr. MacMillan appears to be complaining
about.