to name or not name

Fri Jul 28 18:28:01 UTC 1995

On Fri, 28 Jul 1995, Hans-Werner Braun wrote:

> >Yuckk! Why put all the intelligence in the central system. Look at the 
> 
> What central system? Did I say central system?

Yup. You talked about cellular auto-roaming, about something (a central 
system) that maps names to locations. 

> POP servers and mail forwarders are friends of mine. I use both every single
> day.

The essence of POP servers and mail forwarding is that the intelligence 
is distributed, not in the central system.

> All I am trying to say is that I think we should decouple the complexities
> of the Internet system from what a user sees, while at the same time
> increasing the functionality. Setting up and running and whatever a POP
> server and such is no problem with me, but, for example, my kids prefer to
> just have things work, and finding what they are looking for, and them not
> having to worry about arbitrary complexities. Not that they would not care,
> but they should not *have* to.

This can still be solved at the fringes by making better configuration 
and administration tools for existing technology. I see some of this with 
things like IBM's SMIT on AIX systems, RedHat Linux's admin tools, the 
Caldera Network Desktop (http://www.caldera.com) by former Novell employees.
Sun is moving in this direction from what I hear. I know that SCO's 
latest release includes the first cut at a simple graphical admin system 
based on Visual TCL.

And once NT and MacOS get their Internet services working properly, that 
will be another example. Your LC575 at home will be able to forward your 
mail to your Powerbook in Puerto Rico with no rocket science required.

Michael Dillon                                    Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc.                                 Fax: +1-604-542-4130
http://www.memra.com                             E-mail: michael at memra.com