[ih] Fwd: Re: Early Internet history

[Dave Crocker]

with Tom's permission.


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: Early Internet history
Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2018 09:41:02 -0400
From: Tom Van Vleck <thvv at multicians.org>
To: Dave Crocker <dcrocker at bbiw.net>


> On Jul 3, 2018, at 10:17 PM, Dave Crocker <dcrocker at bbiw.net> wrote:
> 
> I'm trying to make a point of notifying anyone I mentioned during the
> interview, mostly in case I got something wrong.  I've already had
> two corrections to notify the Collective folks about...

Hi Dave, very interesting!

(I am not a fan of podcasts.. too linear.  My superpower is READING and
I can read faster than I can listen.)

There are a few things I would have said a little differently than you did.

MAIL

The late Noel Morris and I did the CTSS MAIL command together, and he
should not be forgotten.
We wrote MAIL because it had been proposed in a MIT Comp Center memo by
Louis Pouzin, Glenda Schroeder, and Pat Crisman, all of whom worked at
MIT on CTSS for F. J. Corbató. We wanted to use it. Nobody had time to
write MAIL though.
Noel and I were users of CTSS and asked if we could write MAIL and
contribute it to the system.

Your description of CTSS MAIL mixes implementation and function.
Functionally, a user wrote a small text file, and then typed MAIL MY
FILE M1416 786 to send it. (Files on CTSS had two-word names. User
addresses on CTSS had a "problem number" like M1416 and a "programmer
number" assigned by the Comp Center.) The recipient would be notified if
his MAIL BOX was non-empty, and could view it with the PRINT command.
Each user's MAIL BOX file had the file mode "private" meaning that only
the account owner could read or modify it -- except that
system-privileged programs could do so.

As we were implementing MAIL, we wrote the absolute minimum program that
would work.
There were many suggested features, options, etc. We left them out.
Idea being to get it working, and put features in later after community
discussion.

The essential features of MAIL were
- user to user, i.e. personal
- asynchronous
- file based, persistent
- secure

Messages were
- identified by sender and date
- limited in size to one disk record: 2592 BCD characters

We didn't send between computers because we had only one computer. We
didn't send graphics because nobody had a graphics terminal. We didn't
have SUBJECT any other mail headers; but conventions rapidly sprang up.
We limited messages in size because disk space was very scarce and
expensive.


Multics

As the editor of Multicians.org I am sometimes vexed by people's
theories about Unix. Ken and Dennis would probably not have "gone off on
their own" and written Unix if Bell Labs management had not dropped out
of the Multics project in 1969. The size and scope of Unix was a result
of the resources available to its creators. Ken and Dennis made useful
contributions to Multics and never questioned its scope or elaborateness
in my hearing while they worked on the system. Ken was one of the
smartest people I have ever met: his clarity of thought and writing were
an inspiration, and he was a great programmer and colleague.


regards, tom