18 Oct 1991

FRIENDS OF BRUNO NEWSLETTER - #1A

See also: Overview .

This is the first in a series of notes regarding the experimental project between the ITU and Digital Resource Institute (DRI) of the University of Colorado where ITU standards and other materials are being made openly available on a server connected to the Internet. The server is named Bruno.

20,000 ACCESS IN FIRST 5 DAYS.

In the first five days of operation after the project was announced at a joint TELECOM'91-INTEROP'91 videoconference, DRI Head Prof. Michael Schwartz announced that Bruno had processed 350 mail-based requests and over 20,000 FTP file retrievals. He suspected there would be even more traffic if it weren't for the fact that Bruno was running at CPU capacity. Schwarz noted that "clearly there is some pent-up demand here..."

MORE THAN 5000 FILES AVAILABLE.

The initial implementation on Bruno contains 5132 files - primarily the standards of CCITT. The full text of CCITT questions, as well as some NIST standards are also available. The files are available in ASCII, Postscript, TROFF, WinWord, RTF, and WordPerfect5 formats, with graphics in Encapsulated Postscript and TIFF formats. Additional standards of CCITT and CCIR are scheduled in the near future.

DRAFT STANDARDS SOUGHT.

Christian Huitema, Director of research at France's prestigious Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) conveyed his congratulations for starting the Internet "blue book" service saying it "was an impressive job." Huitema indicated that European network managers "observed a significant peak in network traffic after the announcement -- and the server was indeed saturated!" He also expressed strong interest "to see intermediate proposals, documents, etc -- not just the final ones" noting for example, that he could not get a copy of the new ASN.1 drafts through normal channels. He noted the importance of starting a back- up server on the European continent as soon as possible.

EARLIER VERSIONS SOUGHT.

Thomas Lenggenhager, chairman of the RARE working group 1 on Message Handling systems, requested that the ITU put earlier versions of the CCITT standards on the servers. He noted that many standards such as X.25 and X.400 should be accessable as long as they are used in real life.

IMPACT OF ACCESS BEING FELT.

Rob Blokzijl, at Nikhef- H (National Institute for Nuclear and High-Energy Physics) and Chairman RIPE conveyed his congratulations on the service, noting that the "server will quickly become a very popular one." He points out the urgent need for "putting up a similar service in Europe...indicating that many Europeans are clogging the scarce Intercontinental bandwidth by pulling the same files across the Atlantic."

SONS OF BRUNO VOLUNTEERED.

Carl Malamud, who headed the Bruno server project noted that at last count he had received offers from 20 different countries volunteering additional servers around the world.

For further information on the Bruno experiment, contact Tony Rutkowski