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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 @$,

after which the user engages in the usual dialog with the mail system.

	The sending machine dials the receiving machine just as is done with
fax.  When the receiving machine answers, the sender announces that it has a
message for .  Implementing this can involve either implementation of
protocols in a user machine or a special machine that pretends to be a user of
the receiving machine or local area network.  The former involves less
hardwarebut the latter involves less modification to the operating system of
the receiving machine.

	I have heard various arguments as to why integrating electronic mail
with other network services is the right idea.  I could argue the point
theoretically, but it seems better to simply point out that telefax, which
originated more recently than electronic mail is already far more widespread
outside the computer science community.  Indeed it is often used for
communicating with someone who is thought to have an email address when
getting the forwarding connections right seems too complicated.

The World of the Future

	Eventually, there will be optical fiber to every home or office
supplied by the telephone companies.  The same transmission facilities will
serve telephone, picturephone, telefax, electronic mail, telnet, file transfer,
computer utilities, access to the Library of Congress, the ``National Jukebox''
and maybe even a national video jukebox.  In the meantime, different services
require different communication rates and can afford different costs to get
them.  However, current telephone rates transmit substantial messages coast-to-
coast for less than the price of a stamp.  Indeed the success of telefax, not
to speak of Federal Express, shows that people are willing to pay even higher
costs.

What about the next 20 years of email?

	There are two kinds of problems, technical and political. Guess which
is easier.

	The main technical requirement is the development of a set of point-to-
point telephone mail protocols.  Any of several existing network mail protocols
could be adapted for the purpose. Presumably the same kinds of modems and
dialers that are used for fax would be appropriate but would give better
transmission speeds.

	Perhaps the organizationally simplest solution would be to get one or
more of the various UNIX consortia to add a direct mail telephone protocol to
UUCP.  Such a protocol would allow mail to be addressed to a user-id at a
telephone number.  The computer would require a dialer and a modem with
whatever characteristics were taken as standard and it would be well to use the
same standards as have been adopted for telefax.  It mustn't require pre-
arrangement between the sending and receiving computers, and therefore cannot
involve any kind of login. Non-UNIX systems would then imitate the protocol.

	Fax has another advantage that needs to be matched and can be
overmatched.  Since fax transmits images, fully formatted documents can be
transmitted.  However, this loses the ability to edit the document.  This can
be beaten by email, provided there arises a widely used standard for
representing documents that preserves editability.

	The political problem is more difficult, because there are enormous
vested interests in the present lack of system. There are the rival electronic
mail companies.  There are the organizers of the various non-profit networks.
There are the engineers developing protocols for the various networks. I've
talked to a few of them, and intellectual arguments have remarkably little
effect.  The usual reply is, ``Don't bother me, kid, I'm busy.''

	It would be good if the ACM were to set up a committee to adopt a
telephone electronic mail standard.  However, I fear the vested interests would
be too strong, and the idea would die from being loaded with requirements for
features that could be too expensive to realize in the near future.

	Fortunately, there is free enterprise. Therefore, the most likely way
of getting direct electronic mail is for some company to offer a piece of
hardware as an electronic mail terminal including the facilities for connecting
to the current variety of local area networks (LANs). The most likely way for
this to be accomplished is for the makers of fax machines to offer ASCII
service as well.  This will obviate the growing practice of some users of fax
of printing out their messages in an OCR font, transmitting them by fax,
whereupon the receiver scans them with an OCR scanner to get them back into
computer form.

	This is probably how the world will have to get rid of the
substantially useless and actually harmful mail network industry.

	More generally, suppose the same need can be met either by buying a
product or subscribing to a service.  If the costs are at all close, the people
who sell the product win out over those selling the service.  Why this is so I
leave to psychologists, and experts in marketing, but I suppose it has to do
with the fact that selling services requires continual selling to keep the
customers, and this keeps the prices high.

	I hope my pessimism about institutions is unwarranted, but I remember
a quotation from John von Neumann to some effect like expecting institutions
to behave rationally is like expecting heat to flow from a cold place to a hot
place.

	I must confess that I don't understand the relation between this
proposal and the various electronic communication standards that have been
adopted like X25 and X400.  I only note that the enormous effort put into these
standards has not resulted in direct telephone electronic mail or anything else
as widely usable as telefax.

	I am grateful for comments from many people on a version distributed
by electronic mail to various BBOARDS.

John McCarthy