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

[Dave Crocker]

On 7/22/2018 3:59 PM, Clem cole wrote:
> 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.

 From a paper that Allman co-authored:

      "Sendmail started out as delivermail, written by
Eric Allman, then a graduate student and staff member
at the University of California at Berkeley. Delivermail
solved the problem of routing mail between three
different networks running on the Berkeley campus at
the time: the ARPAnet, UUCP, and BerkNet. The first
public version was distributed in 1979 as part of the
Fourth Berkeley Software Distribution (4BSD) and
later as part of 4.1BSD [Allm85]."

      Sendmail Evolution: 8.10 and Beyond
      http://www.sendmail.org/~gshapiro/Sendmail-8.10.Paper.pdf


That is, Eric wrote both delivermail and sendmail.  As I recall, 
delivermail was essentially a switching mechanism, cobbling together 
existing email functions.  sendmail was more integrated.

d/
-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net