[ih] Hourglass model question

[Dave Crocker]

> Perhaps you can fill in some missing pieces for me.  Larry Roberts did 
> indeed write RD, a set of TECO macros that implemented a mail user 
> agent.  What I'm not clear about is where it fit in the chronology of 
> mail software.  


In the earliest days of Arpanet Mail -- ie, after Tomlinson's work 
connected Tenex systems and as FTP deployed to allow other hosts to 
exchange mail -- the tools for reading mail really just dumped it out.

On Tenex, there was Sndmsg for sending a message to a set of recipients 
and it's Readmail was arguably sophisticated because it would dump out 
all of the 'new' mail, ie, mail received since the last time mail was 
dumped.  Dumped means display en masse.

Apparently Steve Lukasik was the first email user overwhelmed by the 
scale of messages he received, and he asked Larry to find a way for the 
message flow to be more manageable.  RD was the result.  I believe it 
was the first MUA that allowed per-message manipulation for reading, 
filing and deleting.  Vittal's MSG notably added forwarding and 
replying.  (I quickly viewed the presence of the reply function as 
seminal and subjectively assessed email flow as increasing exponentially 
within months of its availability.)

There are a number of histories that chronicle the timeline.  I've got a 
site that lists quite a few:

    http://emailhistory.net/

Probably the most diligent and detailed chronicle is Craig Patridge's 
2008 effort:

    The Technical Development of Internet Email

 
https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2008/02/man2008020003/13rRUx0xPuR

d/
-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net