🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <101@dorsai.ics.hawaii.edu> torben@dorsai.ics.hawaii.edu (Torben N. Nielsen) writes:
>Users should be concerned with addresses and not routes. Do you want to tell the
>postman the exact path he should take in order to deliver your letter? I think
>not. Teach the postman how to do do routing, tell him the address and leave it
>at that.

I agree totally that users should not be concerned with routes.  However I 
strongly believe that in general they should not be concerned with addresses
either.  That's what computers are for.  I have worked in office automation
and on electronic mail systems for a long time now and one mistake I find
many people making is trying to make automated systems mimic manual systems, 
e.g. the "desktop" analogy or the "postman" analogy.  While I do see some
merit in such familiar notions to help educate novice users and make the
transition to automation easier, I think that we often don't end up with
the best systems by adhering to the structures of manual systems.  But I
digress...  

What I want to be able to do when I sit down to send mail is enter what in
the X.400 standard is referred to as a "user friendly" name, e.g. "Jim Gish"
or "Jim Gish @ GTE Labs."
I don't give a hoot, nor should I, that a user's login id is jwg1 and that
his host is bunny.  Now I know that this is a complex technical, 
organizational and like it or not political problem that involves
setting up naming domains and deciding how and what information is to be 
distributed, how name resolution is handled etc., but it is within our 
technical abilities to design and
contruct distributed Directory Service Agents (DSAs).  I also want public
distributed nested distribution lists, private directories, and more.  There
is lots of good work being done in the standards community (see for example
the CCITT x.ds work now in "progress").  However, there are many problems to
be solved and too few people working on them.  Let's get to work to free
ourselves from the user having to know all the address gobbledygook now
required to send a message. (flame over)



-- 
Jim Gish
GTE Laboratories, Inc., Waltham, MA
CSNET: jwg1@gte-labs    UUCP:  ..!harvard!bunny!jwg1