ATENA: A Distributed Name Guide Server in Electronic Mail System

ATENA (A Telephone and Electronic-mail NAme guide system) is a distributed name guide system designed for developing a prototype of new E-mail system. The prototype system is based on CCITT X.500 standard. The goal of ATENA is to provide users with efficient name guide services and to experimentally find ways for constructing integrated network database system. We have provided a model of developing distributed database system and implemented ATENA as a prototype in the environment of UNIX* workstations. The rules which are the foundations of the matching algorithm have been derived to interactively find the true network mail address from ambiguous keys inputed by a user. We also have done the performance evaluations of ATENA with experiments in order to give users an object view of the system.