[ih] The Decline and Fall of Internet Email?

[Jack Haverty]

On 2/13/24 12:17, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
> PS: This doesn't have a lot to do with Internet history.

getting back to history...   Noel's archive of HEADER-PEOPLE mail should 
be interesting to historians.   The oldest archive (1976) is for me a 
nostalgic return to the discussions, debates, flame wars, and battles 
that produced what we're still using today.   I still have the scars.

http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/header/mins02.txt

FYI, I was JFH at MIT-DM.  Looking at those mail exchanges now can give you 
a feeling for what the process of "research" was like in the then-new 
world of networking in the early 1970s.  IMHO, the traditional world of 
academia, involving papers published and critiqued in learned journals, 
talks at conferences, and letters exchanged between pairs of researchers 
was rapidly being replaced by online interactions such as are captured 
in those archives.   I admit being guilty of "pushing the envelope" a 
bit -- e.g., one of the emails I sent required an hour to be transmitted 
across the Arpanet.

RFCs existed as an online form of traditional debate, as indicated by 
their name - "Request For Comments".  I even wrote a few, but I don't 
remember ever seeing any comments in subsequent RFCs.  Such comments 
occurred on the email lists and unfortunately were ephemeral so much of 
the ongoing debate, discussions, proposals, and such have been lost - 
unless someone like Noel somehow saved them. There were many other lists 
similar to HEADER-PEOPLE addressing different topics.

If you read through that HEADER-PEOPLE archive above, you'll get a feel 
for the way the network community worked 50 years ago as we were all 
just trying to figure out how to use this new communications medium.   
It was clear that its utility should be more than just logging in to 
your remote computer or transferring files between your computers.

You might also notice that many of the issues related to email that were 
brought up as problems to be solved, 50 years ago, still plague us today.

In particular the intense debates recorded in that 1976 archive about 
"simple" versus "complicated" email mechanisms eventually settled into a 
decision to first produce a "simple" mechanism as an interim solution, 
to be later replaced with a more capable scheme for email.  That was the 
"S" in SMTP - the SIMPLE mail transport protocol.

The next generation was still to be researched but that work pretty much 
stopped as the focus shifted to implementing SMTP.  RFC713 was one piece 
we (Lick's group) proposed as a basis for exchanging data structures 
across the network, to facilitate computers to interact with other 
computers.  It was never implemented but today things like XML, JSON, et 
al provide similar capabilities.

Jack Haverty




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