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From: JMC@sail.stanford.edu (John McCarthy)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Networks Considered Harmful - For Electronic Mail
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Date: 17 Aug 89 23:19:00 GMT
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X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 306, message 1 of 5
Electronic mail (email), using ARPANET and other networks has
been in use for almost 20 years. The widespread use of telefax is more recent.
However, unless email is freed from dependence on the networks, I predict it
will be supplanted by telefax for most uses in spite of its many advantages
over telefax. These advantages include the fact that information is
transmitted more cheaply as character streams than as images. Multiple
addressees are readily accommodated. Moreover, messages transmitted as
character streams can be readily filed, searched, edited and used by computer
programs.
The reason why telefax will supplant email unless email is separated
from special networks is that telefax works by using the existing telephone
network directly. To become a telefax user, it is only necessary to buy a
telefax machine for a price between $1,000 and $5,000 (depending on features)
and to publicize one's fax number on stationery, on business cards and in
telephone directories. Once this is done anyone in the world can communicate
with you. No complicated network addresses and no politics to determine who is
eligible to be on what network. Telefax is already much more widely used than
email, and a Japanese industry estimate is that 5 percent of homes will have
telefax by 1995 and 50 percent by 2010. This is with a $200 target price.
Email could work the same way at similar costs, but because of a
mistake by DARPA about 1970, i.e. making a special-purpose, special-politics
network the main vehicle for electronic mail, it was combined with other
network uses that require higher bandwith and packet switching.
Another mistake was UUCP. It uses the telephone network, but three
features inherited from its use within Bell Telephone Laboratories made its
widespread adoption a blunder.
1. It assumes that both parties are using the UNIX operating system
rather than using a general mail protocol. This is only moderately serious,
because some other systems have been able to pretend to be UNIX sufficiently
well to implement the protocols.
2. It requires that the message forwarding computer have login
privileges on the receiver. This has resulted in a system of relaying messages
that involves gateways, polling and complicated addresses. This results in
politics in getting connected to the gateways and causes addresses often to
fail.
3. Today forwarding is often a service provided free and therefore of
limited expandibility.
There has been a proliferation of networks and message services on a
variety of time-sharing utilities. Some of them are commercial and some of
them serve various scientific disciplines and commercial activities. The
connections between these networks require politics and often fail. When both
commercial and noncommercial networks must interact there are complications
with charging. A whole industry is founded on the technologically unsound
ideas of competitive special purpose networks and storage of mail on mail
computers. It is as though there were dozens of special purpose telephone
networks and no general network.
The solution is to go to a system that resembles fax in that the ``net
addresses'' are just telephone numbers. The simple form of the command is just
MAIL