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

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Clem cole wrote in <08AB32A8-8AC3-42E8-8BBD-E66C0D2C2EE2 at ccc.com>:
 |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 \

V5 usr/src/s2/mail.c uses append("\nFrom ",buf) and creates
entries which are still valid according to POSIX (mailx), i think.

 |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.   

This is what i thought: "Unix style needs".
V5 did not have any `reply' command and "Save?"d "mailbox" message
bytes were simply appended to the "mbox" file.  (Reading the
"mailbox" simply wrote the content to file descriptor 1.)

I do not know code earlier than V7 which performed ">From "
quoting to avoid misinterpreting these boundaries, too.

 |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

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)