[ih] First ARPANET Link Put Into Service: November 21, 1969

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

IIRC, both Marty Yonke's BananaRD and John Vittal's
MSG re-implemented/re-programmed RD (from TECO) in the SAIL programming
language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAIL_(programming_language)

On Sat, Dec 13, 2025 at 1:04 PM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> On 11/24/2025 2:25 AM, Steve Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> > When
> > email first became operational, he wrote a TECO program to read email.
>
>
> This being a history list, it's worth noting that this was RD and is
> credited as the first purpose-built per-message reading and handling
> application.  (Tenex already had readmail, which just dumped out
> everything in the inbox file since the last time readmail had been run.)
>
> RD functionality was re-implemented, producing two new versions. One, by
> Marty Yonke was BananaRD.  (Banana was a community slang term for
> spiffy, as I recall).
>
> Very shortly after that and derived from the same code base, John Vittal
> released MSG, which was the first application to have a reply (answer)
> function, which allowed very quick and easy email exchanges.
>
> d/
>
> --
> Dave Crocker
>
> Brandenburg InternetWorking
> bbiw.net
> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
>
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-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True