[ih] from whence cometh ">" ?

[Craig Partridge]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2025 at 9:04 AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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...)
>

No change on receive side because Ray assumed he was exchanging email
between TENEX machines and TENEX had a well known location for the user's
mailbox, so sndmsg used cpynet to append the new message to the specified
user's mailbox file on the remote system.

This, of course, meant that initially, email only worked on TENEX but since
about half of all ARPANET systems at the time were TENEX, email still took
off.

Fitting email into FTP and picking up on Dick Watson's idea that there
should be an indirection between user name and mailbox (so that different
systems could specify where user mailboxes lived) happened in summer 1972
(a year after Tomlinson's initial work).  Watson's indirection solved a lot
of issues, but Multics ran into the issue of needing an intermediate user
identity to receive the mail and figure out what mailbox to put it in, so
Mike Padlipsky invented ANONYMOUS.


>
> 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.
>
>
As Dave indicates, I wrote a paper about this topic (in 2008, based on
interviews with most of the key participants) in IEEE Annals (126
footnotes, some of which discuss various points of, usually minor,
disagreement in people's memories about how things evolved).  You can
download a copy at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nPFLlLbjmZn8QrT9bWUt8NLqLE6R2n6q/view?usp=sharing

Craig


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