[ih] Question re rate of growth of the Arpanet

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

let's not forget that "between" Larry Roberts RD and John Vittal's MSG was
Marty Yonkee's BANANARD, viz.:

"... Lawrence Roberts, the project manager for the ARPANET development,
took the idea of READMAIL, which dumped all "recent" messages onto the
user's terminal, and wrote a program for TENEX in TECO macros called RD,
which permitted access to individual messages.[88] Barry Wessler then
updated RD and called it NRD.[89]

Marty Yonke rewrote NRD to include reading, access to SNDMSG for sending,
and a help system, and called the utility WRD, which was later known as
BANANARD. John Vittal then updated this version to include three important
commands: Move (combined save/delete command), Answer (determined to whom a
reply should be sent) and Forward (sent a message to a person who was not
already a recipient). The system was called MSG. With inclusion of these
features, MSG is considered to be the first integrated modern electronic
mail program, from which many other applications have descended.[88]..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email

geoff

On Tue, Apr 22, 2025 at 8:24 AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> On 4/22/2025 8:23 AM, Johan Helsingius via Internet-history wrote:
> > Pretty much, yes. Leaf nodes could survive on a 1200 bps connection,
> > but I don't think I ever saw anything slower.
>
>
> MMDF was initially developed for use by the Army Materiél Command, in
> 1979, but a year or two later it was applied to the initial operation of
> CSNet, the forerunner to NSFNet.
>
> It's role was as an email gateway to Arpanet mail (and then, of course,
> Internet Mail.)  Its contact with these 'distant' participants was over
> dial-up.  Although X.29/X.25 could be used to emulate a phone call, most
> connections really were via telephone.
>
> Speeds were 300 or 1200 baud, where I think 300 was the most common
> initially.
>
> It was quite noteworthy that having email transfer take place entirely
> in the background made even 300 baud useful for email traffic of those
> days.  Users simply did not have to know or care what the connection
> speed was, since the transfer happened 'away' from them.
>
> There was, however one problem this model had: Users were not aware what
> the connection speed was, or when there were problems.
>
> One day, I got a call from a site's admin claiming that no mail was
> getting through.  There would be a connection for about an hour and then
> it would break off, repeating at the next wake-up cycle.
>
> Looking at the logs showed that the queue was stuck on trying to send a
> 1MB file... sigh.
>
> The user environment that I shipped with MMDF contained some
> alternatives, but the popular choice was code that emulated BBN Tenex`s
> SNDMSG(*) and ISI's MSG(**).  This was in the days long before there was
> official support for attachments, but people would include files
> anyhow..  In SNDMSG, do a Ctl-B and you stuffed the file into the
> message.  You did not have to know or care how big it was.  sigh.
>
> The dial-up link simply could not sustain a data call long enough.
>
>
> d/
>
>
> (*) SNDMSG was the program Ray Tomlinson hacked, to create the first
> 'networked' email, in 1971.
>
> (**) MSG was written by John Vittal and was functionally derived from
> the first email program, RD, that let you selectively read mail; it was
> developed by the Arpa CS lead, Larry Roberts, albeit I hear some other
> folk had more than little involvement.  More significant was that MSG
> was the first program to have a reply command, those its constrained
> command model forced choose 'A'nswer, instead. The presence of that
> function altered email use dramatically, since it meant someone
> responding did not have to laboriously fill out address and subject info
> each time.
>
> --
> Dave Crocker
>
> Brandenburg InternetWorking
> bbiw.net
> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
> --
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> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
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>
>

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True