[ih] Mark Crispin: 1956 - 2012

[Yasuhiro Orange Morishita]

Hello,

It's very sad news.  I remember his funny netnews articles,
especially his impressive signature, "Gaijin! Gaijin!"...

I dig'ed the hostname, shown as his email address,
and surprisingly, it's still registered.

dig +short Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU
140.142.110.27

RIP...
--
Yasuhiro 'Orange' Morishita <yasuhiro at jprs.co.jp>

From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Tue,  8 Jan 2013 07:42:14 -0500 (EST)

> Sad news...
> 
>     Noel
> 
> --------
> 
>   Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2013 10:53:18 +0100
>   From: Eliot Lear <lear at cisco.com>
> 
> It's probably escaped our notice because of the holidays, Mark Crispin
> passed away on the 28th of December.  I didn't know Mark too well, but
> he was a very important visionary. 
> 
> I first enjoyed his work as a user of the MM program on TOPS-20, upon
> which he based the design of IMAP.  MM featured strong searching and
> marking capabilities, as well as all the customization a person could
> want.  It was through MM that people individualized there messages with
> funny headers or a cute name.  And it was all so easy to use.  Mark was
> constantly reminding us about that, and how UNIX's interface could
> always stand improvement.  Mark was an unabashed TOPS-20 fan.
> 
> Before the world had fully converged on vt100 semantics, Mark worked to
> standardize SUPDUP and the SUPDUP option.  He was also early to
> recognize the limitations of a single host table.
> 
> Mark's sense of humor brought us RFC-748, the Telnet randomly-lose
> option, which was the first April 1 RFC.  He also wrote another such RFC
> for UTF-9 and UTF-10.
> 
> Most of us benefit from Mark's work today through our use of IMAP, which
> followed Einstein's advice by having a protocol that was as simple as
> possible to tackle the necessary problems, but no simpler.  We know this
> because our first attempt was POP, which was too simple.  Mark knew he
> had hit the balance right because he made benefited from his experience
> with lots of running code and direct work with many end users.
> 
> I will miss his quirkiness, his cowboy boots, and his recommendations
> for the best Japanese food in a town where the IETF would visit, and I
> will miss the contributions he should have had more time to make.
> 
> Eliot
>