[ih] from whence cometh ">" ?

[Dave Crocker]

> You are absolutely right, David.  It is absolutely clear that the SMTP was derived from Tenex mail.
> The similarity in the commands and responses is unmistakable! How did I miss it!


This venue's having a focus on historical detail, it's worth being clear 
about specific bits of the email origin story:

1. Initial Arpanet discussions about email were going in the direction 
of creating a mechanism to send an email to a remote printer, print it 
out, and have it distributed through inter-office mail.(RFC 278)  This 
matched the model for memo transmission in organizations of the time.  
(Possibly worth noting is that MCI Mail, built 10 years later, actual 
implemented this option -- albeit at a city level with 4-hour courier or 
overnight postal delivery.)

2. Ray Tomlinson did not like that approach and decided to do a quick 
hack to show an alternative, at the end of 1971. He modified Tenex 
sndmsg to support the @hostname syntax,  linked in the Tenex cpynet 
mechanism to move the message to the hostname host.  I don't recall 
whether mods to the receive side were required.  (I had not known about 
Ray's process for deciding to do this, until the relatively recent 
public issues with a guy's claiming to have invented emai. This prompted 
discussion within the email community, including Ray's reciting his 
motivational basis.  One might note some process similarity with the 
Multics -> Unix sequence...)

3. Since Tenex was popular in the Arpanet community, Ray's hack 
propagated quickly.

4. Email was not in the original 1971 or 1972 Bhushan FTP 
specifications, but discussions moved to the addition of the MAIL and 
MLFL commands, permitting sending a message to a single recipient.  
Craig's paper goes into the sequence in detail. From a quick scan, it 
appears the MAIL and MLFL command details did not show up in the FTP 
spec, itself, until 1980.

5. The success of this early service prompted discussions about a more 
capable version, with proposals inside and outside the Arpanet 
community.  MTP was an example from inside.  It did not go far.  A 
'S'implified version, was produced at the end of 1982, 10 years after 
email had been in operation on the Arpanet.


d/

-- 
Dave Crocker

Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
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