[ih] from whence cometh ">" ?

[John Day]

Wasn’t the ‘official’ ARPANET format ASCII which as relate ended a line with CR LF. (Carriage Return, Line Feed)?
(Remember how typewriters worked?)  ;-)

The problem came up with Multics which used EBCDIC where the comparable function was NL (New Line).

This made moving text from Multics a bit of a nuisance that caused character counts to be off depending on how many lines the file contained.

Take care,
John

> On Oct 14, 2025, at 18:03, Steve Crocker via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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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