Slashdot Mirror
On the Chaotic Evolution of Email?
TheCarlMau asks: "I'm doing research on the origins of email in the 70's and 80's. I'm particularly interested in how this technology was designed and implemented without any planned trajectory (ie: nobody sat down in 1970 and planned to create email as we know it today in 2006). As very little has been written on the history, I'm wondering if the Slashdot community could provide any insights, stories, or first-hand experiences? It seems to me, as a person who did not experience this 'revolution,' that the offspring of the ARPANET technology was hackish and sometimes chaotic. What do you think on this matter?"
Can be found by reading the Requests for Comment associated with that protocol. In other words there WAS planning involved- a good deal of planning- it's just that the end-users were completely different than the original audience- the original audience were arpanet researchers, whose system was so good it overtook the competeing FIDONet hackers- which resulted in spammers.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/074346837 6/qid=1137543821/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl/202- 4708284-5091803
Provides a good background to how the internet came about, including a chapter on email.
There was email long before there were networks. http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html describes early email on Multics, between multiple users time-sharing one mainframe.
The dictionary attackers are brutal.
I get my internet service from Comcast. I don't use my Comcast email account, but my girlfriend needed an account, so I created her one under mine (you get like 5 aliases). Her first name happens to be 4 letters long and rather uncommon, so I was able to get her first choice, xxxx@comcast.net.
I created the account at maybe 10:00am. She logged in, for the very first time, at around 11:00am. By that time, having never ever used the account, she already had about 10-20 spam messages.
Bloody amazing.
I think that, next time around, I'll try a much longer user name, as several people have already suggested.
It seems to me, as a person who did not experience this 'revolution,' that the offspring of the ARPANET technology was hackish and sometimes chaotic. What do you think on this matter?"
I think you should count yourself lucky you missed it. Just a few of the many joys:
Great. Well, now I know what I'm going to be having nightmares about tonight.
--MarkusQ
You might do well to check postings by Mark Crispin in the comp.sys.next.* USENET archives, sometime around 1988-1992. NeXT developed an early version of mail with fonts, colors, rulers (margins/tabs/spacing/justification.etc.), embedded pictures (TIFF, PostScript), attached files in arbitrary locations in the text, a picture of the sender, and embedded sound clips. Basically the program created an RTF file with attachments, tar'd it up, uuencoded it, and sent it as a plaintext message. Worked perfectly -- if you had a NeXT computer to read it on! To my knowledge, no other system had email even remotely as sophisticated as this.
Mark began working on a related project: MIME. This was done at U Washington, which developed MIME in conjunction with pine and pico. He spent a lot of time on the NeXT USENET lists posting vitriol about how much better MIME was going to be than NeXTmail. In retrospect the postings, and responses, give a lot of insight into how MIME was shaped, developed, and of course how it was influenced by NeXTmail.
First, let me say, Google is your friend. But since I'm really nice, I'll ask Ray Tomlinson:
http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/home.html
"I sent the first network email in 1971 using a program I wrote called SNDMSG. I have written a brief account of the first email with the intent of forestalling some of the more common questions about that event. If you want to see what the computer used to send the first email looked like, you will find that here too."
The latest Slashdot meme.
The Catholic Church officially recognizes evolution as a valid theory, they do not believe in 7 day creationism or any of that other ID bullshit.
The issue with going right to the RFCs is that E-Mail was widely deployed before Internet access was. Corporations and government used inhouse systems such as IBM PROFS, Lotus ccMail, and even MS Mail. There were large non-RFC mail networks, including MCI, AT&T, and Worldcom's Lotus Notes network (that had something like a million users when the Internet was far smaller).
When Internet mail started to catch on in the early 90s, the Internet Mail capabilties were rather obviously kludged into these systems, usually with a funky addressing scheme such as "joeblow@example.com @ INTERNET", difficulty with file attachments, etc. Microsoft even introduced a X400 based product in 1994 where it was clear that SMTP was an after-thought. It was only around 2000 when SMTP was integrated into Exchange and Notes as a core protocol, rather than a gateway.
Many of the features that people from the Internet Mail tradition find distasteful, such as Top-Reply and Rich (html) Text come directly from the capabilities of corporate systems. Any sort of comprehensive history of email has to include these systems, rather than just the Unix boxes with their sendmail.
Finally, let me just complain that the RFCs for Internet Mail took a very simple spec and turned it into a complete fricken mess, with all sorts of ridiclous, overly-complex encoding crap for back-compatibility with 7-bit systems. It would be nice if someday someone flushed all this MIME crap and started over with a nice clean protocol like HTTP.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.