Subject: An historic URL

From: "Jiwoong Lee" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2001 16:14:53 +0900

I found one interesting prehistoric URL expression 
at the last page of RFC 826. It says,

...(thanks to MOON@SCRC@MIT-MC).

That RFC was written in 19 years ago and I don't know
what was going on in ARPANET at that time.

That old expression shows some interesing points.

A. It has muliple "@" symbols.
B. All letters are capital.
C. It doesn't include any dots.

Interesting. Could some archaeologists please explain 
this hieroglyph ? BTW, where and when the current version
of URL was defined ?

Thanks for your great info.
Regards,

Jiwoong

---

From: "Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2001 09:26:41 -0500

From:  "Jiwoong Lee" <[email-masked]>
Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>
To:  <[email-masked]>
Date:  Thu, 8 Mar 2001 16:14:53 +0900

>...(thanks to MOON@SCRC@MIT-MC).

This is not a URL, URI, or any other UR*.  The most general syntax for
these beasts, as defined in RFC 2396, is

   <scheme>:<scheme-dependent-part>

so something without a ":" in it can't be a UR*.

>A. It has muliple "@" symbols.

It's an email address.  It means the local address "MOON@SCRC" at the
host MIT-MC.  That was in the HOSTS.TXT days, before DNS, so host
names had no "."s in them.  Used as an email address, this should have
sent the mail to MIT-MC which would have interpreted the left half and
sent it to MOON at SCRC.  Presumably SCRC was a local machine/system
known to MIT-MC.  Because many systems (and people) got confused by
more than one "@", it later became common to use the "percent sign
hack" and write this sort of explicitly routed multi-hop email address
as MOON%SCRC@MIT-MC or the like.  I suppose the most modern
translation of this old email address might be

       <mailto:[email-masked]>

or something like that.

>B. All letters are capital.

In such primitive times, that was common for case insensitive items as
machine and user names were.

>C. It doesn't include any dots.

See above.  Before DNS, there was no formal hierarchy and dots were
not used in host names.  Serious DNS deployment started about 18 years
ago and HOSTS.TXT didn't totally vanish until about 11 years ago.

>this hieroglyph ? BTW, where and when the current version

As above, latest URL/URI definition is in RFC 2396 (as modified by RFC
2732).

>Thanks for your great info.

Thanks,
Donald
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 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd                    [email-masked]
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