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?"
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