[ih] MAP & BBN

[Bill Ricker]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 6:41 PM, Vint Cerf <vint at google.com> wrote:

> I thought it was reasonable to assert that Ray Tomlinson invented
> networked email, Alex - do you see it differently?
>

Depends what you mean by 'Networked' and 'Invented' !

As an aside, I am surprised that no one has staked a prior claim for IBM
360's, but perhaps either the prevalence of ad hoc virtual reader / virtual
punch "mail" didn't immediately appear with CP68, or they weren't
sufficiently connected early enough?

If Email is the iconic '@', that is Tomlinson's, uncontested it seems. He
claimed the @ sign for it, elegantly mnemonic, an inspired choice.  (But to
the great frustration of all those whose LINEKILL it was !)  His
SNDMSG donated the ubiquitous @ copula to posterity, so SNDMSG is rightly
historic.

Tomlinson apparently indeed implemented inter-machine over-ARPA-net e-mail
first (even though it was within a single building) . But it was still
vendor specific (TENEX only), it was not usable by ARPANET hosts of other
brands.

However, the need for a general all-ARPANET vendor-neutral netmail was
conceived first, and was implemented shortly after.

If one omits multi-host, Tom van Vleck and Noel Morris on CTSS have
precedence on email over all, it seems.

If invention is an act of intellect separate from construction, van Vleck,
Licklider and R. W. Watson claim precedence for conception of
interoperable, networked email.

SNDMSG was first in in the limited sense as first inter-host over ARPANET
mail delivery reported as implemented and tested.  It was no doubt a
valuable proof of concept, and SNDMSG acquired an instance of  the netmail
protocols soon enough (as did the older Multics mail command).  But it did
not blossom into netmail on its own.

Internet email is not vendor partitioned today, and ARPANET mail was not so
envisioned when hypothesized in 1968/1969. Netmail is the ancestor of
vendor-neutral email as we know it today.

Mike regularly referred to  e-mail as "or what we called netmail when we
were inventing it", the plural pronoun recognizing the multiple
contributions of the working team of programmers from all interested hosts.

Reference -  http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html
(Yes, i will re-post "And They Argued All Night..." to fix the broken link
there. Eventually. )

-- 
Bill
@n1vux bill.n1vux at gmail.com
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