🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 27 Feb 90 23:20:21 EST Dan Lynch said:
>                BITNET has two services that are not present in the
>Internet.  THose are : Store and Forward Anonymous file transfer and
>Interactive messaging.

>Well, BITNET wins hands down on item one, but not on item two.  The Internet
>has had "chat" and "talk" (I.e., realtime "terminal-to-terminal"
>interaction) for almost 20 years.  It's just that it is not highly used
>(and therefor not widely known or even implemented) because (this is
>my own "because") its mail protocl is "realtime".  That is, one can
>send mail and expect that the recipient will get it in a few minutes.This
> obviates the need for having a "realtime interactive messaging service".

As I understand this, there is one major difference between the
internet implementation and the BITNET implementation.  Messages in
NJE are given priority over files.  I don't expect my message to get
there in minutes, I expect it to get there in seconds (which it did to
the fellow I was messaging with in Turkey yesterday).  It seems to me
that the fundamental notion of "more important" is missing in the
internet approach.

This is not surprising when one expects the connection to be
(effectively) machine to machine, but it has always ignored the delays
inherent in getting the messge out the socket on the senders machine
and from the socket onto the recipients screen.  Had the BITNET type
of messge processing been seen as useful when the protocols were
defined, I suspect there would have been a network wide service for
this already (just as there is for FTP).  It was not seen as important
by the folks who were architecting the internet so it isn't there.

That makes neither approach better, just different.