[ih] from whence cometh ">" ?

[Steve Crocker]

The header of the messages included a character count, but the count was
out of sync as mail moved from one system to another because, IIRC, the
newline character got expanded to two characters, CR (carriage return)
followed by NL (new line).

I was working for Larry in the DARPA office when he wrote RD. He and I were
both TECO hackers.  His program was painfully slow when there was a bunch
of mail because he scanned for the next message looking for the next header
but not using the character count.

I took his code and rewrote the part that looked for the next message by
moving forward a line at a time and adjusting the count by 1 each time.
The speed up was quite noticeable.

(Hacking a set of TECO macros was a bit of fun.  I had previously written a
macro loader, which made it much easier to edit and test a set of macros.)

My next job was at ISI, and I started to use Marty Yonke's BananaRD.  One
day it stopped working and I asked Marty to take a look.  After he looked,
he exploded, "I never thought anyone would have more than 300 messages."

Steve


On Tue, Oct 14, 2025 at 5:41 PM Craig Partridge via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Well, I can add some partial light.
>
> The original mbox format, used by Ray Tomlinson was that there was no
> format.  Mail was simply appended to a file which you read with your text
> editor.  Ray included a From: field (but not To:) and Subject: and Date:
> (see RFC 561).
>
> This was a PITA to the first email program writers because it was
> murderously hard to parse the mailbox.  As a result, in 1973 Martin Yonke
> (author of BananaRD, the first standalone mail reading program and
> successor to Larry Robert's RD [a set of TECO macros]) decided that mail
> systems when delivering to a mailbox should separate emails with 4 SOH
> (Start of Header) characters -- and that's how most do it by default to, I
> believe, the present day.
>
> Some systems persist, instead, on finding a From: field as a delimiter
> which creates the >From requirement.
>
> Craig
>
> On Tue, Oct 14, 2025 at 1:59 PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> > There's a slightly related point which I found mentioned in RFC 4155,
> > which defined the application/mbox media type:
> >
> > >    Many implementations are also known to escape message body lines
> that
> > >    begin with the character sequence of "From ", so as to prevent
> > >    confusion with overly-liberal parsers that do not search for full
> > >    separator lines.  In the common case, a leading Greater-Than symbol
> > >    (0x3E) is used for this purpose (with "From " becoming ">From ").
> >
> > MBOX format is notoriously variable and under-documented. RFC 4155 cites
> > http://qmail.org./man/man5/mbox.html which implies that everybody knows
> > about ">". If anybody can find the *original* specification of the MBOXO
> > format (that is not a typo) that might help.
> >
> > Regards/Ngā mihi
> >     Brian Carpenter
> >
> > On 15-Oct-25 02:38, Craig Partridge via Internet-history wrote:
> > > I just spent half an hour digging through the msggroup, tcp-ip and
> > > header-people mailing lists from the mid to late 1970s and none of them
> > use
> > > the diple.
> > >
> > > So I'm guessing it was an innovation in one of the email or netnews
> > reading
> > > tools developed in the late 1970s to early 1980s.  There are lots of
> > > choices that appeared about that time: readnews, rn, Berkeley Mail (?),
> > MH
> > > and, I think, some Emacs reading tools.
> > >
> > > Craig
> > >
> > > On Tue, Oct 14, 2025 at 5:04 AM Eliot Lear via Internet-history <
> > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> > >
> > >> Hi Internet Historians,
> > >>
> > >> I wonder if anyone knows the earliest use of "> " as a means to quote
> > >> text.  A research here in Switzerland is asking me.  I can only date
> it
> > >> as far back as "rn" and netnews, but surely it goes back beyond 1984.
> > >> The researcher mentioned that there have been various forms of a
> > >> "diple"[1] as Ancient Greece and in the bible.  But when did it get
> > >> picked up in Internet times?
> > >>
> > >> Any takers?
> > >>
> > >> Thanks,
> > >>
> > >> Eliot
> > >>
> > >> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diple_(textual_symbol)
> > >>
> > >> --
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> > >
> > >
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