[ih] The UCLA 360/91 on the ARPAnet/Internet

[Craig Partridge]

> The network working group did nco, telnet, FTP, eventually smtp, although
> the latter might have been post-1982 and for Internet and not Arpanet (?).

MTP and its successor, SMTP, were for the Internet, not ARPANET.  As best
I can reconstruct from RFCs and various people's recollections, the
initial plan was to launch TCP/IP with a new and improved email that
did multimedia mail.  But the DARPA PM (initials VC) realized in early
1980 that TCP/IP was going to mature ahead of multimedia -- and also felt
that the Internet needed something better than a hacked FTP supporting such
an important application.  So he created a transition plan, documented
in RFCs 771 and 773.  RFC 772, by Postel and Sluizer, introduced MTP, the
planned Internet email protocol.  After a year of working on MTP, and in
response to regular criticism of the MTP design, apparently led by Peter
Kirstein, Jon tossed MTP for a simpler SMTP (which, it appears, was
inspired by the RFC 785 documentation of the MTP TOPS-20 envelope -- as
each SMTP command fills in a line in the TOPS-20 envelope file).

Thanks!

Craig