[ih] Hourglass model question

[Steve Crocker]

Thanks.

On Sat, Jul 6, 2019 at 12:44 PM Dave Crocker <dhc at dcrocker.net> wrote:

>
> > 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
>
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