sendmail.cf

Fri Feb 22 19:27:35 UTC 2019

On February 22, 2019 at 10:50 bjorn at mork.no (Bjørn Mork) wrote:
 > bzs at theworld.com writes:
 > 
 > > The predecessor to sendmail was delivermail, 1979, also written by
 > > Eric Allman.
 > >
 > >   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivermail
 > 
 > Damn.  Now you made me read RFC801 and wonder why we didn't have an
 > updated version for the IPv6 transition.  Or: Where would the Internet
 > have been today without that very explicit "complete switch over" goal?

Not sure what you mean but reasonably late-model sendmail works with
IPv6, it's a compile option which is on by default.

Or do you mean the NCP->TCP transition? The internet was a lot smaller
and one could actually get all the ducks in a line back then.

And almost everyone (if not everyone) was connected via IMPs rather
than CPE routers and the IMPs were more or less centrally managed or
if you managed one you accepted responsibility to work in concert with
the others.

I don't know the high-water mark for the number of IMPs or more
specifically how many existed on the NCP->TCP flag day but I'm pretty
sure the theoretical maximum was 256 tho no doubt someone had a way to
extend that. But, w/o extensive changes, 256, probably 254, not sure 0
or 255 could be an IMP number, whatever!

Largely because your IMP was identified by the last octet of an IP
address (I think that's right) so Boston University was 10.4.0.44
which meant port 4 on IMP 44 (which sat at MIT on the 9th floor of 545
tech square.)

Of course to speak to the net via your IMP connection your computer(s)
also had to switch over to TCP. But, again, these were usually just
one or a few big machines per site likely all in the same room or same
administration group anyhow.

Life was much simpler back then.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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