[ih] from whence cometh ">" ?

[Eliot Lear]

Just to be clear what I'm asking, the >From hack was just about avoiding 
confusion with message separation.  I'm specifically talking about

 > quoting someone's message like this.
 > using the diple

as opposed to

      quoting a message by just indentation, which is what we on the 
-20s mostly did (I think).

Thanks,

Eliot

On 15.10.2025 00:35, John R. Levine via Internet-history 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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