[ih] propagation of early email?

[Craig Partridge]

> 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.

The initial SNDMSG used a pre-FTP program called CPYNET -- don't know
if that was TENEX specific.  The FTP spec did not exist when Tomlinson
added remote system support to SNDMSG.

> 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....

It would make a lot of sense.

Craig

PS: I think most folks on this list know, but just in case not.
I joined the Internet in 1983 [I was recruited by BBN to learn TCP/IP
(BBN taught one or two people TCP/IP every year) and then get IP networking
working on Proteon 80 Mbps ring networks for Navy command centers].  The
information I'm reciting here came from doing a bunch of interviews and
scouring literature in 2007/2008 for an article on the technical
development of Internet email.