[ih] from whence cometh ">" ?

[Adam Sampson]

Greg Skinner via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
writes:

> I poked around net.unix-wizards using Google Groups and noticed some
> use of “> “ popped up in late 1983 [1] There may have been a new
> release of Usenet sources sometime around then.

That matches the messages in the SAILDART and ITS public archives -- I
can't see any examples of this quoting style prior to 1983.

In the utzoo Usenet archive, the earliest example of the style is a
message from Sid Shapiro at Wang Institute on 1982-01-06, which looks
like it's been pasted together by hand. The first that looks like an
automated quote of a previous message is from seismo!hao!woods on
1983-05-05, and then there are a few dozen in 1983-06 with numbers
growing rapidly after that.

It is predated by a few years by the use of > to quote lines that start
with From in UUCP message bodies, initially for UUCP source paths, which
might have influenced the style? The earliest two examples:

>From mark Sat Apr 19 01:18:51 1980
(from ucbvax!mark, in the utzoo archive)

>From uucp Tue Jun 24 01:35:52 1980 remote from wh5ess
>From clemc Mon Jun 23 13:53:58 1980  remote from teklabs
(from Clem Cole, then at Tektronix, to Les Earnest at SAIL)

-- 
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org>                         <http://offog.org/>