[ih] Larry Roberts & RD the first electronic mail manager software [was written in TECO on TENEX] (fwd)

Tue Aug 8 10:20:27 PDT 2023

Steve's reply to yours truly apparently didn't go out to the IH list (or
appear in the archives at
ttps://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
<https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>)

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Steve Crocker <steve at shinkuro.com>
Date: Tue, Aug 8, 2023 at 9:24 AM
Subject: Re: [ih] Larry Roberts & RD the first electronic mail manager
software [was written in TECO on TENEX]
To: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff at iconia.com>
Cc: Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>, Steve Crocker <
steve at shinkuro.com>

Adding a little bit to your summary:

I was in (D)ARPA/IPTO from mid 1971 to mid 1974.  When I arrived, the
Arpanet had been in operation for almost two years.  IPTO consisted of the
director (Larry Roberts), three program managers (Bruce Dolan, John Perry,
me), a senior non-technical person who handled our budgets and
related matters (Al Blue), and two secretaries.  Steve Lukasik was the
(D)ARPA director and hence Larry's boss.  I write (D)ARPA here because the
agency was christened the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and
embedded within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) in 1958.  On 1
July 1972 it was moved out of OSD and became a separate Defense Agency.  In
the process, it acquitted the initial D, i.e. Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, hence DARPA.  The transition made essentially no
difference in our mission or operation.

A short time later, we had a TIP installed in the office.  This meant we
could connect  a large number of terminals.  Everyone in our office had a
terminal on the desk, and soon others through the agency had terminals
too.  Lukasik was a strong proponent and soon required that each of his
direct reports, i.e. the directors of the other Offices, use email to
communicate with him. Each of us was also given an account on the Tenex
machine at the new USC Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI).

Lukasik used email to transform the way he conducted business.  Even though
we were all housed in the same office building -- 1400 Wilson Blvd,
Arlington, VA, where a plaque now stands commemorating the creation of the
Arpanet -- and could meet face to face easily, he found email made it
possible for him to reorganize his time and attention.  (More on this
below.)

The earliest made reader we had was RD.  I believe Roberts wrote.  He was a
very competent TECO hacker, and he whipped it up quickly.  In that version,
mail was stored in a continuous file.  In some later mail systems, each
message was in a separate file, but at the beginning all of a user's mail
was in a continuous file.  These files grew fairly quickly.  Moving to a
particular message became a slow process.

I too was a fairly competent TECO hacker.  I took a look and realized why
it was taking too long to find a message.  In the file, each message was
preceded by a line that had a string indicating it was the beginning of a
message and a count of the number of characters in the message.  In
principle, that should have made it quick to move forward in the file from
one message to the next.  However, that count didn't coincide with the
actual number of characters in the file.  When the count was created, it
treated the end of each line as one character, the newline character (NL),
but when the message arrived, it became two characters, carriage return
(CR) followed by line feed (LF).  Hence the TECO code had a loop that moved
forward one character at a time until it found the beginning of the next
message.  Very slow.  (I might be misremembering and reversing these
effects, but either way it was the discrepancy between the way ends of
lines were demarcated at the point of creation and the the way ends of
lines were demarcated on the receiving side.)

I replaced that loop with code that skipped forward a line at a time and
then adjusted the number of characters it still had to go.  The speedup was
dramatic.

Above I alluded to changes in Lukasik's management style.  My primary focus
while I was at (D)ARPA was the AI portfolio, i.e., MIT, CMU, Stanford, SRI
and BN and others.  AI was unquestionably a long term bet.  (D)ARPA's usual
profile was heavy funding of some area for five years or so to trigger a
large change.  ("A factor of ten, not ten percent" was the common
catchphrase.). We knew AI was a *much* longer trek.  Fifty years, most
likely.  That meant it was a constant challenge to protect the funding and
explain the research to Congress.

In the UK, Science Research Council, the UK counterpart to the US NSF, had
been funding Donald Michie's AI research at the University of Edinburgh.
According to a 29 June 1973 news article in Science, "In early 1972 Sir
James Lighthill of Cambridge University undertook to survey the field of
artificial intelligence (AI) for the Science Research Council of Britain."
His report was dismissive of AI and had a strongly negative influence on AI
funding in the UK.  Toward the end of the Science news article, the
following was embedded:

Even granting that AI is an intellectually important area for research, it
is fair to ask whether the field is using its resources wisely. The
Lighthill report suggests that, in the United States especially, little
attention has been given to this question, in part because there has been a
relatively assured source of funding.  As is true for computer science in
general, research on AI is pre-dominantly supported by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which provides about $4.5 million a year.

29 July 1973 was a Friday.  That evening I was sitting at my terminal at
home.  Abruptly, I'm interrupted by a chat request from Lukasik.  I had no
idea he even knew how to do that.  After we were connected, he asked if he
printed something on his terminal, would I see it?  I assured him I would.
Immediately a ten point memo starts printing on my terminal.  He's
concerned that Congress might see this comment in Science and take aim at
our AI program.  His memo dealt with possible press or Congressional
questions, coordination internally, etc.  I understood completely he
perceived a possible threat and was making sure we were manning the
ramparts.  Fortunately, the attack never came.  Even so, we did have a
session in the office on a Sunday afternoon later in the summer watching a
taped copy of the debate between McCarthy and Lighthill.

AI wars aside, the relevance to this thread is how quickly and effectively
Lukasik absorbed the new technology and put it to use.

Steve

On Mon, Aug 7, 2023 at 8:48 PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> "... In 1969 Roberts became director of the Information Processing
> Techniques Office at ARPA. In 1971 he wrote one of the first e-mail
> programs, RD, which for the first time allowed users to save, delete, and
> organize their messages....
> so sez:
> https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lawrence-Roberts
>
> while
>
> https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/1999-00/internet/email.html
>  sez:
>
> ...The Rise of Email by way of Convenient Mail-Managers
>
> Stephen Lukasik, one of ARPA's directors from 1971-75 might be one of the
> most important advocates of email in its young age. He strongly encouraged
> his staff to use email. It was even considered the most effective way to
> reach Lukasik. Close friends and colleagues with Larry Roberts, Lukasik
> confided to Roberts in 1973 that he was beginning to face problems
> organizing the chaotic pile of messages received each day. (At this point,
> in a study conducted by ARPA under Lukasik's direction discovered that 75%
> of all ARPANET traffic was in the form of email.) Not to mention, reading
> and responding to the messages was, as of yet not a simple matter. In
> response, Roberts wrote the first "mail-manager software," RD. Its
> functions included displaying a menu of messages and allowing the user to
> file messages and delete messages. This inspired an outburst of variations
> on the mail manager. A legendary variation, MSG was created in 1975 by John
> Vittal. MSG quickly became the most widely used mail-management program due
> to its convenient features. It could handle an even greater amount of mail
> than RD, could sort messages into separate files, and most importantly,
> reply and forward with much greater ease. MSG also spawned a large amount
> of variations...
>
> [any others?]
>
> --
> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
> living as The Truth is True
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True