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In-Reply-To: Your message of "24 May 93 13:03:53 -0800." <9305250834.aa29578@Note.nsf.gov>
Date: Tue, 25 May 93 10:03:42 EDT
From: Steve Goldstein--Ph +1-202-357-9717 <sgoldste@gov.nsf.cise.cise>

In asking <<... "I am wondering what over-all, total, advantage X.400 offers?" 
and "I would like to see a comparative analysis of TCP/IP versus X.400".>>
Jock risks opening religious wars once again.

Jock, they do much the same thing, or at least, they are being used
principally for the same thing.  X.400 has a lot more potential for
other services (FAX, Telex, snail mail delivery at the local end)
built in --note: "potential"-- however, the TCP/IP crowd manages to
tack similar capabilities onto their stack whenever it seems that people
are going to actually use capabilities under deployment in X.400.  X.400,
by the way, is actually a lot of X.400's: 1984, 1988,..., and commercial
offerors tend to offer only the 1984 version which is not full-functioned.
Not all SMTP (TCP/IP's messaging application) implementations support all the
new spiffies that have been offered (I cannot use Multi-Media extensions
here at NSF, for example...:-( ).  

So, the real question ought'a be: "How can we make services as seamless as
possible among communities that for one reason or another use different, 
but complementary protocol stacks?"


- --Steve G.

+ ======================================================================== +
||  Steven N. Goldstein                                                   ||
||  Program Director, Interagency & International Networking Coordination ||
||  Div. of Networking and Communications Research & Infrastructure       ||
||  National Science Foundation                                           ||
||  1800 G Street, N.W., Room 416                                         ||
||  Washington, D.C. 20550                                                ||
||  Tel: +1-202-357-9717                                                  ||
||  FAX: +1-202-357-5865                                                  ||
||  goldstein@NSF.GOV (Internet); goldstei@NSF(BITNET); S.GOLDSTEIN/OMNET ||
+ ======================================================================== +


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