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(If you ask me, veering off into unsolicited advertisements for
unrelated ANSI standards isn't actually on-topic, but there are
other posts so I'll assume Perry will let this through...
I'm making historical comments so this is grist for the original
query.)
At 08:39 PM 1/8/01 -0500, Rich Salz wrote:
>The adoption by X.509 for use as authentication in X.500 got us common
>technology, and is probably the only reason anyone will ever have to
>learn
>ASN.1 and DER. :)
Some of us learned ASN.1 and DER because of The Great ISO Scare of
the 80's. That gave us a disfunctional protocol stack, which included
disfunctional file transfer (FTAM), virtual terminal (VT), and email (X.400).
Other than the pollution of the Microsoft email gene pool (Exchange has
X.400 code in it's belly, something about ancestors frome one's past one
should be ashamed of...) there was little real X.400 usage, but that and
a small amount of FTAM were the only 'real' reasons some of us learned ASN.1.
It was appalling to see that SNMP, and later PKIX, decided to adopt this bad
idea from the past. X.500 was the directory scheme for X.400, as was DAP,
so seing it recast itself as LDAP wasn't to nice either.
>The old IETF PEM project gave us "---BEGIN" lines :) and showed
>empirically
>that global X.500 deployment is a non-starter.
Or, it showed that you can have disfunctional standards activities inside
the IETF. Both are probably true. PEM also gave us BASE 64. So there's
TWO things it did reasonably.
> RSA's version, which
>became
>the IETF's S/MIME showed how to do it practically.
Practically? You're joking, right?
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