[ih] from whence cometh ">" ?

[Greg Skinner]

On Oct 14, 2025, at 3:35 PM, John R. Levine via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 14 Oct 2025, Dave Crocker wrote:
>> Since Unix was on the Arpanet by no later than 1975. (I don't remember what year we got it at UCLA, but I know Rand had it by then.
>> 
>> So, 'long before' would almost require being before Unix was developed.
> 
> I remembered that I have the v6 and v7 source code on my laptop, as one does.
> 
> The 1975 v6 version of /bin/mail had no special From processing and no network code.  The v7 version had code to work with uucp and has the >From hack.  The date on the source file is May 5 1979 so that's the latest possible but it was more likely added in 1978 when uucp was written.
> 
> Regards,
> John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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The Unix Tree source code for mail.c from V7 Unix (dated 1979-05-05) has a call to sendmail() implementing the >From hack. [1]

Greg

[1] https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/mail.c