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

[Dave Crocker]

On 5/13/2012 8:09 AM, Vint Cerf wrote:
> The network working group did nco, telnet, FTP, eventually smtp,
> although the latter might have been post-1982 and for Internet and not
> Arpanet (?).


Right.  SMTP was done in 1982, for the Internet Mail.(*)  Postel held 
some meetings that various folk attended.

At the same time, for RFC822, I only did mailing list discussion with 
folk.  But then, 822 was a relatively minor upgrade to RFC 733 from 1977 
(which was for Arpanet mail).


> On 5/13/2012 9:39 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>> I thought SMTP came out of MSGROUP, or perhaps some hybrid of MSGGROUP and
>> the old NWG? (I vaguely recall chit-chat from other hackers in the MIT AI Lab
>> about it.) It _definitely_ was not from the TCP/Ip group(s).

Well, Jon created and ran the effort.  I don't remember what mailing 
list he used for 821 (nor which I used for 822).  Might have been 
msggroup, I suppose.  For 822 it might have been hdr-people...


>> SMTP was always intended for use with both NCP and TCP, and saw most of its
>> early use under NCP.

Mumble.  SMTP doesn't care about the underlying transport details, but 
its motivation was definitely the move to the Internet.


d/

(*) Beside upgrading to domain names, the main benefit of having SMTP 
over the FTP-based mail commands we'd been using for 10 years was 
allowing multiple addressees per transmitted message.  This has become 
ironic as current mail-sending softrware tends towards one-addressee per 
message, for management control -- different message identifiers and 
logging for different addressees and content tailoring.  sigh.

-- 
  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net