[ih] Reporter query on the history of greater-than in quoted replies

[Dave Crocker]

On 7/21/2018 6:57 PM, John Levine wrote:
> In article <45A45A2A-4855-4459-9E91-6E8BC3C94588 at icloud.com> you write:
>> Noel Chiappa wrote:
>>
>>> Inclusion in a news reader is probably what made it _popular_. But there may
>>> have been an _individual_ who came up with it, and it got taken up into the
>>> news reader(s) after people saw it and started copying it.
> 
> I'd guess it came via the >From convention in unix format mailboxes to quote
> lines that would otherwise look like messages separators.

Allman introduced the ">" quoting of From at the beginning of a line in 
in delivermail, I believe, but certainly by the time of sendmail.  As 
you suggest, it was to prevent the string from being interpreted as a 
start of message.


> Perhaps one of the early unix guys will remember why they did it that way.

Might have been unix, but more likely was the Tenex msg, which was the 
first program to have a 'forward' command.

d/


-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net