mail service with no mx (was - Re: Computer systems blamed for feeble hurricane response?)

Wed Sep 14 23:27:47 UTC 2005

On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 11:09:54PM -0700, Dave Crocker wrote:
> >>Application layer firewalls have existed for at least 6 years.
> >>
> >Make that 15....
> 
> I suspect that claiming to that they existed farther back than 1990 would 
> require careful debate about the functionality.
> 
> Taking it at its most general: a boundary barrier service that mediated 
> particular application exchanges between an "interior" Administrative 
> Environment, versus the rest of the public network.  One can reasonably 
> argue than any such mediation has a security component to it.
> 
> Therefore one could argue that firewall functionality was around at least 
> 25 years ago -- there were a number of email boundary gateway mediating 
> services by then -- and very probably back to 1973.  (I just know that some 
> MIT type is going to claim pre-1970, given the generality of the definition 
> I offered.)

Dave,

I think the mail gateways back when the various networks were being put
together into an internet had as their functional purpose unifying
disparate networks.  On the contrary, a firewall has as its purpose
partitioning a network that otherwise would not have been.  I don't
think one will hear from MIT, given that.

But Steve and Ches and Dave Presotto at Bell, and Brian Reid and others
at DEC, were doing the partitioning thing in the late 1980's and 1990.
Right?

-- 
Joe Yao
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