alt Hacker NewsThis is an example of how simplicity won over features.
Not even then, when people with access to computers were probably in the thousands, would anyone liked to type "C=no; ADMD=; PRMD=uninett; O=uninett; S=alvestrand; G=harald" just like in the example of the article.
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Is this an example of simplicity winning over features, or an example of features that are advertised but don't exist failing to win over the competition?
Some examples from the article:
> You could have messaged an entire organization or department
This is a mailing list.
> So it was possible, say, for one implementation of X.400 to offer X.400 features like recalling a message, in theory at least, when such guarantees would fail as soon as messages left their walled garden. But “they couldn't buck the rules of physics,” Borenstein concluded. Once a message reached another server, the X.400 implementations could say that an email was recalled or permanently deleted, but there was no way to prove that it hadn’t been backed up surreptitiously.
This is a feature that (1) is in the spec, and also (2) is impossible to implement. That's not a real feature. It's a bug in the spec.
> You don’t email with X.400 today. That is, unless you work in aviation, where AMHS communications for sharing flight plans and more are still based on X.400 standards (which enables, among other things, prioritizing messages and sending them to the tower at an airport instead of a specific individual).
This is... also a mailing list. There's nothing difficult about having an email address for the tower. That email could go to one person, or many people. What's the difference supposed to be? What "feature" are we saying X.400 has that email didn't start with?
You were not supposed to type it out, you looked it up using your X.500 directory.