[ih] propagation of early email?

[Miles Fidelman]

Jack Haverty wrote:
> 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".
>
Well, I checked in with Ken Harrenstien who reports:

------ quote ---------

Yeah, more or less.  There were actually two similar systems developed
at almost the same time.  MIT-DM had something called COMSYS written
in MDL (Muddle) -- if memory serves me correctly, that was by Jack
Haverty (JFH).  The one I wrote was called COMSAT, was written in
MIDAS assembler, and ran on all the other ITS systems (AI, ML, MC, and
whatever else was later brought to life remotely or virtually).

The ITS systems originally had email limited to their own machine or
other local ITSes via the JOB device which acted as a sort of NFS;
this may be what you remember from the 1971 time frame.  True Arpanet
email using the FTP protocol was very kludgy and didn't really take
off until COMSAT/COMSYS were developed a couple years later and took
on the job of queueing messages and delivering them at whatever time
the destination host happened to be alive.  Both of those systems had
some unique features that didn't appear elsewhere for quite some time,
at least until sendmail/unix became popular; for example, they could
serve as mailing list expanders and one of the first such lists was
"Header-People".  The traffic was so heavy that I wrote a couple of
RFCs proposing FTP extensions to reduce the number of message copies
sent to each host (you can find them via search; those were adopted by
SMTP) and even implemented them for some non-ITS systems.

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In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra