Work Paleontology

It all started today by a conversation with a colleague on our long experience with LDAP and Directory Services…

E3X LogoI told him that I’ve started my carrier as a developer in the X.400 domain. In my first job, for a French startup called E3X, between 1991 and 1995, I’ve wrote 3 different versions of a P7 Message Store for the UCOM.X400 product line. Along the same dates, I’ve also been involved a little bit with X.500. One of the things that I’ve done, was using our UCOM.X500 product to store information about some restaurants in the Sophia-Antipolis area, so that we could search and choose one whenever we had visitors coming. The data included beside the usual address and phone number, the type of food, opening hours, whether reservation was necessary and so on…

The schema defined eventually got cleaned up and published as an internet draft by my manager at that time, Dr. Alain Zahm. You can find a summary of this internet draft at the very end of this page: http://choices.cs.uiuc.edu/uChoices/Papers/Proposals/92.MobileComputing/INDEX.

Minutes of IETF OSI-DS meeting in November 1992 also shows that the schema was discussed.

Now that all public and research X.500 servers have been stopped and decommissioned, there is no trace of this anymore. Google is too young to have references to this, and so is Yahoo. But I do remember that in the mid 90ies, whenever I was searching for my name, most of the results coming back were associated with some little known restaurants on the French Riviera !

In 1995, I joined Sun to work on the Solstice X.400 product and a year later, with a coworker, I’ve started working on University of Michigan slapd code to produce Sun Directory Services 1.0, released in September 1997… the rest is history 🙂

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One thought on “Work Paleontology

  1. Carol McDonald 01 July 2009 / 14:26

    I also started my carrier as a developer in the X.400 domain. In my first job, for IBM in Germany, I developed an X.400 User Agent and I worked on interoperability testing with 20 other companies for the Telecom 87 convention in Geneva. After that I worked on the development of a X.400 Message Transfer Agent for Danet. Then later I worked on the X.500 user directory schema for Hoffman La Roche in Basel Switzerland. I also worked for Digital in Sophia Antipolis, so I know Sophia too.

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