[ih] propagation of early email?

[Craig Partridge]

My understanding is that what propagated was SNDMSG -- and since half
the Internet was TENEX systems at the time, this meant about half the
machines (and more than 1/2 of the Internet membership) had access.
DARPA had adopted it internally by early 1972, which probably pushed
some other systems.

There was an April 1972 FTP meeting at which it was decided to enhance
FTP to enable email between all machines (not just SNDMSG enabled ones)
work -- that led to MLFL in August 1972.  I observe the FTP meeting was
held at MIT, and the story runs that MLFL was inspired by an MIT
grad student sticking his nose in Abhay Bhushan's office and saying a
better email solution was needed -- all of which strongly suggests MIT
was in the networked email game early and consistent with your notion that
ITS was somehow fit in.

Thanks!

Craig

> Hi Folks,
> 
> So... harkening back to the recent discussions on the "invention of 
> email".....
> 
> Ray Tomlinson dates his work on inter-machine sendmsg to 1971.  I seem 
> to recall arriving at MIT in Sept. 1971 and using email on the AI lab's 
> ITS system very shortly thereafter.  Which leads to a question:  anybody 
> have a sense of how Ray's work propagated from BBN to the rest of the world?
> 
> The only datapoint I have is from Ray's online accounting 
> (http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html) that states:
> "These first messages were sent in late 1971. The next release of TENEX 
> went out in early 1972 and included the version of SNDMSG with network 
> mail capabilities."
> 
> Miles Fidelman
> 
> -- 
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra
> 
********************
Craig Partridge
Chief Scientist, BBN Technologies
E-mail: craig at aland.bbn.com or craig at bbn.com
Phone: +1 517 324 3425