The UK "Grey Book" email system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols) used email addresses the other way around (in the same timeframe that the UK was using a stack over X.25 as their internetworking protocol).
Email gateways existed to convert between the different systems, but when all country codes were added to the internet, some addresses were simply ambiguous. (An address ending in .cs might be either czechoslavakia or a computer science department.)
The main email software responsible for this slicing and dicing was known as PP, which helps explain the excellent quote on ASR (alt.sysadmin.recovery) a few years later:
Honestly I find it comforting that people who think that the solution to inconvenient addressing problems is more and different syntax haven't won the argument. :)
JANET (the UK university network) had a NRS (Name Registration Service - similar to DNS) that worked from least-to-most specific. So Cambridge was uk.ac.cam instead of today's cam.ac.uk. There were gateways to talk to email servers on ARPANET and reverse the ordering - there's more on it here:
I think that you mean "numerals", not math in general.
In our system (and in the Arabic "Indian" system, as pointed out by a fellow reply) numerals are written with the least significative figure to the right, so in that sense it's like com.twitter@holysee.
However, the author has acknowledged that there was a minor error in the post, so this is a case of a retrofitted explanation :-)
In fact, notations do not have to be consistent about digit significance. See, for example, US dates (9/11/2001) or German (and Arabic) long-form of most two digit numerals, which are read backwards, as in "four and twenty blackbirds" (happy to be corrected about Arabic...).
Even in Arabic, numbers are the exception, written from left to write.
انا من مواليد ١٩٨٦.
I was born in 1986.
You will notice the number sequencing, although slightly different looking, is the same as in Western orthography. Why? Arabs took their numbering system from the Indians, and adapted it.
The only way in which it makes sense to talk about numbers being written "right to left" or "left to right" is when comparing the order of speech sounds to the ordering of numerals read. In English it goes from the biggest to the smallest: "420" ==> "four hundred and twenty".
Then German and Danish are neither left-to-right nor right-to-left, since 123 is einhundertdreiundzwanzig or hundredetreogtyve ("onehundredthreeandtwenty"), so that doesn't seem to work too well, either...
Numeric notation is built right to left. To count up from 1 to 9 uses single digits, of course. Then to go from 9 to 10, the ones place increments and rolls over, and we add the new tens digit on the left, not the right.
What does it mean to be right-to-left? If it means that least significant values are on the right side and most significant ones on the left side, then ___domain names are left-to-right (as opposed to numeric notation).
USENET was a taxonomy, at least in principle, although like any taxonomy of thought you ran into cases like sci.foo.bar and alt.foo.bar fairly often. A taxonomy should be read from general to specific.
Email addresses are addresses. The metaphor is a geography, which goes from the specific to the general.
Then we have URLS, which go from the specific to the general, hit a slash, reverse direction, and then explode into a bunch of hacked-on features.
Addresses goes from specific to general mostly in countries influenced by British empire. Because international standard require to put city and country at the end, many countries have addresses with mixed order: street, home number, apartment number, city, country.
Also, the method name goes to the right of the class name, so the only reasonable way to have a hierarchical name that reads in a single direction is to put the most general qualifier on the left and the most specific on the right:
well, for the same reasons the urls _should_ be the other way around, plus avoiding inconsistencies with other languages I guess (don't know what languages supported dot-named packages at that time, but I don't think they were the first ones)
For example, a user at Imperial College (IC) would have been: [email protected], rather than [email protected] as they might today.
Email gateways existed to convert between the different systems, but when all country codes were added to the internet, some addresses were simply ambiguous. (An address ending in .cs might be either czechoslavakia or a computer science department.)
The main email software responsible for this slicing and dicing was known as PP, which helps explain the excellent quote on ASR (alt.sysadmin.recovery) a few years later:
http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Quotes.html [search page for "mail transfer agents"]