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Annotation of 43BSDReno/share/doc/ucs/mmdf/p1, revision 1.1

1.1     ! root        1: .SH
        !             2: Introduction and History
        !             3: .PP
        !             4: The Multi-channel Memo Distribution Facility,
        !             5: commonly called MMDF,
        !             6: is a suite of software that has seen a great deal of work since it was
        !             7: originally released in 1980.
        !             8: The original code was designed and implemented by Dave Crocker
        !             9: working under Professor David Farber at the University
        !            10: of Delaware (UDEL).
        !            11: The MMDF system was then chosen to form the initial backbone
        !            12: software for the CSNET project and has been in use for several years
        !            13: by elements of the U.S. Army.
        !            14: The software has seen a great deal of change in the process.
        !            15: The original code is commonly referred to as MMDFI or MMDF Version 1.
        !            16: A number of minor additions and changes were made while fielding MMDFI
        !            17: as the result of collaboration between UDEL and BRL and some other
        !            18: sites.
        !            19: After the original code was fielded in CSNET, Dave Crocker began the
        !            20: development of a upgraded version of the MMDF system which was
        !            21: designed to work in the new Internet
        !            22: domain naming system
        !            23: and was to incorporate numerous design changes suggested by
        !            24: experience with MMDFI.
        !            25: Dave Crocker
        !            26: left the CSNET project before completing this work, approximately
        !            27: two weeks before the TCP/IP switchover of the ARPANET, 1 January 1983.
        !            28: At this time, BRL was a solid MMDF site.  
        !            29: We were reluctant to try to retrofit
        !            30: the existing version of MMDFI
        !            31: to handle the new mail protocols that also took effect on
        !            32: 1 January, so Doug Kingston of
        !            33: BRL undertook the task of finishing the work
        !            34: needed to make MMDFII operational.
        !            35: A production version of MMDFII was installed at BRL during
        !            36: the third week of January 1983, and served
        !            37: as BRL's mail system on three hosts,
        !            38: but there was no stable version of the MMDFII code until June 1983.
        !            39: The first few months of MMDFII
        !            40: were quite rough and it needed a great deal of ``tender loving care''.
        !            41: .PP
        !            42: For reasons that will be clear in a moment, this stable version of June 1983
        !            43: is now referred to as the MMDFII-pre-England version.
        !            44: Around June, a copy of this stable version was delivered to Steve Kille
        !            45: of University College London (UCL) and to Brendan Reilly
        !            46: of UDEL, who
        !            47: had taken over Dave Crocker's work on MMDF at UDEL.
        !            48: Steve Kille made a number of major changes to the handling of domains,
        !            49: address parsing, and handling of the alias files.
        !            50: Steve also added support for NIFTP, a European file transfer protocol
        !            51: used for sending mail in a batch environment.
        !            52: At the same time that
        !            53: Steve was making his enhancements, Doug Kingston continued
        !            54: to develop BRL's copy of MMDFII to make it an even more solid
        !            55: mail system.  BRL's changes were not as major as Steve's
        !            56: but covered a great deal of code and fixed several major outstanding bugs.
        !            57: This dual development led to two variants of MMDFII that each
        !            58: needed the other's improvements.
        !            59: In late September of 1983
        !            60: Brendan Reilly and Doug Kingston spent a week in England with Steve
        !            61: to merge the variants and to discuss future changes and directions
        !            62: for MMDF.  The result of this meeting was a merged version of
        !            63: MMDFII which I will call MMDFII-post-England.
        !            64: Just prior to this trip, the CSNET Information Center (CIC)
        !            65: received a copy of the pre-England MMDF.
        !            66: Their later changes were based on this pre-England version
        !            67: which made merging of their changes into the
        !            68: post-England version somewhat difficult.
        !            69: .PP
        !            70: After the England meeting, Brendan Reilly of UDEL took the role
        !            71: of coordinator of the subsequent changes to MMDF.  Copies of the
        !            72: MMDF-post-England were made simultaneously available to BRL, UCL, and UDEL.
        !            73: Since then many minor changes have been made by all
        !            74: four sites;
        !            75: in essentially all cases these changes have been bug fixes or changes
        !            76: to make MMDF a more stable and robust system.
        !            77: .PP
        !            78: Since then, Doug Kingston at BRL has made changes
        !            79: to the local delivery mechanism, rewriting much of the original
        !            80: code, and the central delivery program has been upgraded to
        !            81: take advantage of large-address-space machines, when possible, to
        !            82: keep retry histories for messages on a host-by-host basis.
        !            83: Bernie Cosell at the CIC has undertaken to speed up MMDF
        !            84: execution by providing a facility for compiling in some of the information
        !            85: normally included in the ASCII text-based version.  Steve Kille
        !            86: an alternative to the ASCII text based version.  Steve Kille
        !            87: has continued to refine the address handling and the British
        !            88: ``backwards'' domain code.
        !            89: .FN
        !            90: The British do domains backwards.  For example, if in the
        !            91: US (Internet) we write ``[email protected]'' known
        !            92: as ``little endian'' order, the British
        !            93: (SERC Net) 
        !            94: write ``[email protected]'' or ``big endian'' order.
        !            95: Put another way, ``big endians'' put the largest, most general,
        !            96: or most significant element of the domain first.  ``Little endians''
        !            97: use the other order, with the most significant part last.
        !            98: [See 
        !            99: .I
        !           100: Gulliver's Travels
        !           101: .R
        !           102: by Joanthan Swift.  The "big endian" vs. "little endian" controversy
        !           103: was a 
        !           104: .I
        !           105: causus belli
        !           106: .R
        !           107: in Lilliput.]
        !           108: .FE
        !           109: Brendan Reilly has made changes to the package to allow it to
        !           110: run on the Altos system and has fixed numerous bugs in
        !           111: the PhoneNet code.

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