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On the Chaotic Evolution of Email?

Posted by Cliff on from the however-it-was-done-at-least-it-still-works dept.

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?"

4 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. What I'm wondering is... by PurifyYourMind · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...when are features like PGP, anti-phishing, anti-spam, working rich text/html, etc. going to become part of a standard that everyone can use easily? Right now there are a bunch of "hacks" that patch up problems with email, and as such there is a huge difference in what some people get versus what others are stuck with. Is this something like IPv6 that will simply have to be mandated and rolled out with the cooperation of lots of large organizations?

    1. Re:What I'm wondering is... by Kelson · · Score: 2, Insightful

      NEVER post your e-mail on a web page. 2. NEVER e-mail somebody you don't know.

      Neither will protect you from dictionary attacks. And now that spammers have armies of zombies at their beck and call, they're doing distributed dictionary attacks, which are harder to detect and block.

      Common first names, first initials with common last names, role descriptions... Heck, we even get spam sent to template@(domain name) because it happened to be active at the time someone tried sending it mail.

      Unless you make your email address really hard to guess....

  2. Re:The history of any internet protocol by Anm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's like saying the history of the web is summarized in the W3C spec for HTML. It hints at the history, and each revision signifies an era in its history, but by no means is it really informative on the influences, predecessors, politiics, and competing ideas.

    To really get to that you need to talk to the people who were there (or find the artifacts of them talking to each other: letters, papers, etc.). Luckily, the 70's are recent enough that many are probably still alive, and there comes a point where usenet was an active archive. I'm sure many of those people maintain active email addresses today.

    I'm not sure what depth of research the submitter was intending, but RFCs and Usenet do provide very good jumping points on the topic.

    Anm

  3. Re:A very small datum by Eivind · · Score: 2, Insightful
    In hindsight, the whole episode was like something out of Harry Potter.

    You noticed this too ? I had that feeling too, though not of HP since he wasn't invented. Today, everyone take it for granted. But it's not. It's anything but. It's mindboggling is what.

    That we consider it trivial that a single click of a mouse-button causes billions of transistors all over the world to change state, magnetic platters to spin, and photons to surge trough hair-thin fibers of glass, all in a split-second, giving you whatever website you clicked the link to is *not* trivial at all. It only seems that way because the technology is so simple to use.