Why did SMTP win? My first business card had my ARPA email address on it, which occasionally generated a question but which was usually ignored by those who didn’t have email. Then people started to list their compuserve or whatever address on their cards — often several addresses — which made me laugh, and then eventually an SMTP address wiped all those alternatives out.
I used to see the same thing with phone numbers: a stack of phone (desk phone), fax, pager, voice mail, mobile, all eventually collapsing into a single phone number.
Why did this not happen with messaging (which is more than 30 years old, despite what the article says)?
SMTP only won for a relatively brief period. Nowadays it's mostly used for newsletters and transactional mails. Personal messaging moved to IM and Discord, business messaging is now largely Teams/Slack.
I sent someone a business email the other day. They told me I got lucky they even saw it, as they now communicate entirely via Slack. Slack isn't even trying to be an email competitor and it still wins.
SMTP is still useful for cases where the additional feature-set of other platforms isn't important but a globally unique ID is.
What is a ARPA email address? I've never heard of it. Did they look different from normal SMTP email address used today? Or was it like your email server just supported ARPA and not SMTP.
I was gumby@MIT-AI.ARPA. By then mail used SMTP but the arpanet had not yet transitioned to IP/TCP.
Those .ARPA names were part of a lengthy transition to the DNS; before this I was just gumby@mit-ai or just gumby@ai
The ARPA. TLD isn’t used for hosts any more but has been repurposed mainly for network database lookups. Yes, the `.` after the TLD is there for a reason.
I used to see the same thing with phone numbers: a stack of phone (desk phone), fax, pager, voice mail, mobile, all eventually collapsing into a single phone number.
Why did this not happen with messaging (which is more than 30 years old, despite what the article says)?