[ih] propagation of early email?

[Jack Haverty]

Wow, 40 years.  We're leaving History and entering Archaeology...

It's getting fuzzier every day, but my recollection is that the early
"email" was accomplished over FTP, by the simple expedient of logging
in to the recipient's machine with FTP as anonymous/guest and then
PUTting a file into some accessible directory - where the user might
or might not see it soon depending on how often s/he looked.  That may
have occurred before the term "email" was even attached to it.

That evolved into the FTP "MAIL" command, where you could connect and,
instead of PUTting a file you would transfer your message as part of
the FTP command stream for delivery directly into a user's directory
(if that's what the FTP server's author decided to do).   E.g., you
would type "MAIL JFH" after connecting to MIT-DM's FTP port, type
whatever you wanted, and signal the end of the "command" to the remote
FTP by typing a line with a single period.  Thus
<CR><LF><PERIOD><CR><LF> became the defacto end-of-message indicator.

It didn't take long (days, not months) for people to throw together
some simple programs to queue email and perform the interactions with
the remote FTP server.   There were many such programs at MIT and no
doubt elsewhere.  I wrote one to act as MIT-DM's "mail daemon", which
became quite elaborate over time.  I recall that Ken Pogran was
involved in the Multics email, struggling with the fact that Multics
really really didn't like programs that crossed boundaries by writing
into someone else's directory.   Someone else (Stallman?  Knight?) did
one for MIT-AI.   Ken Harrenstien was also in there, coding away.  Ray
Tomlinson tossed @ into the fray, which did two things - it made for a
good user interface, and it provided the beginning of structure in
messages by enabling addresses to be more-or-less parseable out of
what was becoming message "headers".

I was in Licklider's group at MIT (he was my thesis adviser).  Al
Vezza was the guy in charge as manager/administrator.  I recall lots
of email discussions (arguments) that both Al and I had with the rest
of the community about the need for a more structured email protocol.
 I had been complaining about the silliness of my program having to
scan every character of every message to make sure there was no
<CR><LF><PERIOD><CR><LF> in the text, which would have prematurely
terminated the message.   It was also worrisome what might happen if
someone sent a message with the following embedded in the text:
              .....<CR><LF><PERIOD><CR><LF>DELE *.*<CR><LF>Y<CR><LF>

I was at MIT in the MIT-DM group starting as a student in 1970/1/2 and
on staff until 1978.  In 1972, Abhay Bhushan's office was a few doors
down the hall from mine.  I can't remember, but it's quite possible
that that grad student who stuck his head into Abhay's office to gripe
about mail protocols was me....

/Jack


On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 7:48 AM, Craig Partridge <craig at aland.bbn.com> wrote:
>
> 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