[ih] MAP & BBN

[Bill Ricker]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 11:42 PM, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:

> The virtual card chutes were fun,
>

Yup!  Magic named virtual devices combined with EXEC or REXX were quite a
toolbox.
(That was a much saner way to fake email than the earlier one i did with
the System 1022 DB for US DOT.)


> but it's been well documented that
> there was email on CTSS in 1965,
>
several years before CP-67 existed.
> That's the earliest reference to it that I know.
>

indeed. (i alluded to that.)

My aside musing was just wondering that RJE etc and local email based on
what you delightfully call Virtual Card Chutes must somewhere have been
combined to create *remote* email prior to BITNET launch in '81. I'm pretty
sure IBM CSC had it in '79, but I can't be certain. I'd quickly have added
RJE to my EXEC MAIL  in '82 if we'd had a second 370 we were *allowed* to
talk to. But how much before then? Could it have antedated the BBN/SNDMSG
as first (homogeneous systems) *networked* email? There's time enough
between CP-67 and '71 for someone to have tried it. RJE was nearly adequate
even without CP-67? But no claimants have surfaced in the Email Invention
debates?

Experiments lost to history are exactly so.

(Of course, the packet-switched community might question the network-ness
of a hypothetical small concatenation of RJE phonelines; but the historic
First Email is between two TENEX hosts on the same IMP in the same
building, also boundary condition in a definition of network.)


-- 
Bill
@n1vux bill.n1vux at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/attachments/20120512/b004d654/attachment.htm>