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

[Clem cole]

Mumble.  I fear V7 is a bit too late.  Delivermail (which predates Eric sendmail) was written by Kurt Shoens at UCB for v6 and I pretty sure Kurt did it.  But I don’t think the idea was Kurt’s.   IIRC it’s on the original BSD (aka 1BSD) tape.  Which was released in 78.  


That said the >From stuff was part of AT&T mbox format which I’m fairly sure is much earlier.    There were a number of programs called mail that bounced around with Fifth & Sixth Edition in my memory.   Where they all came is very fuzzy.     Some of them like Rand changed the mailbox format.  But others did not, particularly the ATT ones because of support for things like UUCP, Datakit et al. 

My >>memory<< was use of mbox was driven by ATT not outside like ArpaNet needs (which drove Rand).


FWIW:  CMU Unix in those days was hash of things from Bell and a lot of local hacks.  The Unix boxes could not send email outside each other and since we had arpanet email on the pdp10s, no one tended build things like mail forwarding. 

So the Unix systems I remember were not hacked beyond Unix style needs and I think we used the mailers as we got them but I don’t trust my memory on this.   My thinking is we used something in EE at least that Ted brought with him from ATT Summit that was probably apart of UNIX/TS around 1976.   


Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On Jul 22, 2018, at 4:22 PM, John R. Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, 22 Jul 2018, Dave Crocker wrote:
>> I don't recall quoting being done by the native Unix mail command, which was 
>> all there was in Unix from the Labs.
> 
>> From the source code to mail.c in v7 Unix, dated May 1979:
> 
>        if (isfrom(line))
>            fputs(">", tmpf);
> 
> The v6 mail program is quite different and doesn't do that.  The v7 mail 
> pogram knew about uucp and shipped off any message with a ! in the 
> recipient address.
> 
> Regards,
> John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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