[ih] Fwd: Reporter query on the history of greater-than in quoted replies

[Stephen Casner]

I looked for examples of the angle bracket used for quoting in my
personal email archive.  It only contains selected messages from the
early days since disk space was still considered expensive then.

The oldest example I found was from January, 1985 that showed two
levels of quoting where the whole message body was included at both
levels and the first line was a ">From:" line.  The inner quote (from
rochester.arpa) included a space after the bracket, while the outer
one (from bbn-vax.arpa) did not.

Another example from April 1985 between two of my colleagues at ISI
includes quoting of the Date, Subject, From and To header lines in
addition to the message body.  This would have been on TOPS-20.  In
those days the email program did not announce itself by adding a
header line of its own, but I observe that the outer message contains
an "In-Reply-To" header as well as non-standard Phone, Address and
Never headers (as in "Never: Play pool with a man named Fats").  I
don't know if those hints help identify the program, but I remember
using MM in that era.  There was some local development on MM at ISI.

For both of these examples the quoting was most likely done by the
email program, but I would guess that the practice started with manual
editing before the programs implemented the feature.  In an example
message from March 1985 I saw angle brackets used to offset a couple
of comments added by the sender as editor in a message that collected
a thread of messages.  In that case it was anti-quoting.

I also observe that in both of these examples the new text was added
below the quoted message rather than above.

One other precursor that I observed was the following example line
from 1981:

    >From decvax!duke!unc!smb  Fri Jun  5 08:45:48 1981

This looks like an example of the MTA inserting the bracket to avoid
having the word "From" at the beginning of a line be detected as the
envelope field marking the start of a message in the email file.  That
practice continues today.  Perhaps this use of the bracket came first
and suggested the use for quoting of nested messages.

                                                        -- Steve