From: "Erik E. Fair"  (Time Keeper) <fair@clock.org>
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 95 22:40:30 PDT
To: Bill Stewart <jlasser@rwd.goucher.edu>
Subject: Re: "Notes" to be Eclipsed by "Netscape"
Message-ID: <v02110101ac8fb13b4275@[17.255.9.110]>
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At 15:21 9/27/95, Bill Stewart wrote:

>Notes was a PC network reimplementation of PLATO, the system that also inspired
>notesfiles, a distant cousin of Netnews (though I'm not sure if netnews was
>originally inspired by PLATO or not...)  Netnews assumes that articles are
>going to propagate for a while and then be trashed; notesfiles assumes you're
>building a knowledge bases that sticks around.  (This transitoriness has
>allowed
>netnews to scale to its current N*100MB/day of trash :-)

Netnews was the old "msgs" program on serious steroids - the thing everyone
was supposed to run in their .login (or .profile) scripts to get
system-wide announcements. My bet is that msgs was inspired by the
TOPS-20/ITS equivalents at MIT. Netnews subsequently underwent relatively
rapid forced evolution in its early days to meet the scaling demands of the
UUCP network, and the Internet of that time (~1983).

The "notesfiles" system from UIUC that Rob Kolstad and Ray Essick wrote was
not so much a distant cousin of NetNews as it was a similar system designed
to solve the same problem (distributed message-based computer
conferencing); I would argue that NetNews had the better transports and
backends, but notesfiles was one or two up on NetNews in UI features
(message threads, etc). The two were sufficiently close that (bad) gateways
were written to move messages from one system to the other.

With any luck, the next round of NetNews user interfaces will remove all of
the UI advantages of notesfiles - the hooks have always been there, but
writing good UI's hard work, and most NetNews hackers (me included) have
had more fun/luck/interest in hacking the transport level to be ever more
slightly efficient.

>AT&T Network Notes is a joint AT&T/Lotus project that uses AT&T's public IPX
>network
>to support Notes on; I think it's now rolled out an accepting customers,
>but it was mostly in press-release stage while I was at AT&T.

I had the impression from what I read that this was going to be an IPX WAN,
and that after announcing this Brave New Service, the partners discovered
just how poorly IPX behaves on a WAN, and so have backed out to Notes on IP
for this thing. I haven't heard much about it since, but I'd be surprised
to find AT&T being foolish enough to try and operate an IPX WAN.

>Notes does have encryption, using RSA and I think RC4; I'm not sure if they
>do the
>40 bits exportable/ 128 domestic bit or just use 40 bits.  Don't know about
>overflow
>kinds of bugs; the bugs I've heard about were more problems integrating with
>Cc:Mail :-)

Lotus is indeed one of RSA's licensees; I remember reading that in the WSJ
at about the same time that Apple became one.

I still place my message-based distributed collaboration bets on NetNews
technology, or some obvious derivative of it.

Erik Fair