From: kre@cs.mu.oz.au (Robert Elz)
Subject: Re: .oz .au - please explain.
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 11:44:00 GMT

In <chris.719196927@suite.sw.oz.au> chris@suite.sw.oz.au (Chris Maltby) writes:

| In <Bw5D37.Aop@syd.dms.CSIRO.AU> marka@syd.dms.CSIRO.AU (Mark Andrews) writes:

| >	OZ was deliberately chosen as a toplevel domain so that it would
| >	not clash with more official toplevel domains, i.e. au/aus

| No way. "oz" predates any choice of "au" to be Australia.

Mark is right, though you're also right that oz predates "au" - at
the time, no-one (or none who were thinking about our naming anyway)
really knew what would happen to the country as a whole, but we did
know that ACSnet could never claim to be all of networking in Aust.
Remember that at the time the practice was just to put host names inside
oz in most cases, taking over something that might ever look like the
only domain for Australia would not have been reasonable.

| In a sense
| you could say that Robert Elz and his cronies chose "au" as the top
| level domain for Australia

Actually ISO chose AU, and I doubt they even knew about ACSnet (what's
more, I suspect they chose it, probably after consulting someone in
Aust, though I have no idea who, rather before ACSnet was invented).

For rationality, simplicity, and general good sense, the ISO country
names have been adopted by all of the various networks to use as
country designators (ie: X.400, etc, as well as the Internet).

| just to make life difficult for ACSnet sites which had already
| standardised on "oz".

I don't know that anyone ever consciously though of "oz" ending up
as sub-domain of "au" (or anything) back when it was adopted, but
we certainly knew that it wasn't going to be adequate for all of Aust
forever.

| Now we have all this com, edu, gov, csiro rubbish as well (:-).

That stuff was invented by the spearnet people (after internally
debating whether they preferred ac.au or edu.au) - remember?

We also have telememo.au and otc.au which map into X.400 domains
(run by Telecom and OTC).  Choosing "oz" (though oz.au would have been
better, with hindsight) and deliberately knowing it wouldn't cover
all of Aust was one of the things we got right, and which has made
it possible to link the various early competing networks in Aust.
The (mostly previous now fortunately) situation in some countries,
where several networks each claimed to represent the country
domain, but none knew of, or would route to, hosts on the other
networks was a disaster.

| I won't argue with that. Though we have to keep on fending off the
| imperial aspirations of Internet connected people who think that they
| own the address space and can make the rules for "domains" like oz.

The internet don't want to make rules for oz - but they do, reasonably,
want to make rules for messages that use the internet - there do need
to be some conventions.  One of the problems with ACSnet, and the uucp
net in the US, has always been that there are no written standards,
which means people end up debating with each other whether what one
site does is correct or not (Your message was unrelpiable from my
mailer, its format is wrong, please fix it!  No, your code is broken,
what I did was just fine, fix your mailer!).  Various code has various
assumptions about how messages should be processed, it would be a lot
easier to accomodate ACSnet if we knew what those assumptions were, and
everyone agreed with them - the internet seems to be applying its standards
to ACSnet not because of anything the internet (or the IETF) have done - I
doubt almost anyone there has ever even heard of ACSnet, but because people
here have largely adopted the Internet standards to use on ACSnet,
partly just to fill the void, and partly because that's what most of
the software they acquire assumes.

| I don't think much of this was discussed in news (except perhaps in
| flames). It just happened...

It was discussed.

| I can tell you the REAL origin of oz though.

My memory has never been able to tell me exactly who invented it, or
more accurately, just where the use of the name for networks originated,
its certainly in wide use other palces, and I'm willing to believe this
one - but remember that from the Bell Labs end our connection looked
kind of like a uucp site (though it was a mailbox on some IBM mainframe
at Waterloo) - I know here we called them "usa", I had a kind of
impression that messages coming back the other way used "aus".  There
was (though probably not at that time) a US uucp site called "oz".

kre