Somewhat off-topic, as/and email (in which i am interested)
related.
Paul Eggert via tz wrote in
<[email protected]>:
|On 2026-03-04 02:19, Philip Paeps wrote:
|> What's wrong with "-07"? That's what's used in other parts of the
|> world. Why is North America exceptional?
|
|Inertia. For example, the earliest email standard, Internet RFC 561
|(1973)[1], coauthored by the late Ray Tomlinson (widely credited for the
|1971 invention of email![2]), was designed mostly for North America
...
|[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc561
|[2]:
|https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/technology/raymond-tomlinson-email-ob\
|ituary.html
Apologising for trampling on an obituary, but regarding
“When it burst onto the scene in 1971,” he added, “it gave the
first tangible indication of how far the Internet might go in
becoming the ubiquitous anyone-anywhere-to-anyone-anywhere
communication system it has become.”
i would point to "The Computer as a Communication Device" of
Licklider and Tayler, from 1968 (a must-read, and iff only for the
drawings; Americas finest, really (honestly)).
Maybe even to note "As we may think" from Vannevar Bush, from
1945, though i treat it with suspicion (the elder were so deep we
cannot even imagine it, and often so bible-"inspired").
Btw i (who spent a little time) came to
{
196 A MAIL BOX PROTOCOL
224 Comments on Mailbox Protocol
354 THE FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL
385 COMMENTS ON THE FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL (RFC 354)
458 Mail Retrieval via FTP
475 FTP AND NETWORK MAIL SYSTEM
524 A Proposed Mail Protocol
542 File Transfer Protocol for the ARPA Network
555 Response to Critiques of the Proposed Mail Protocol
561 Standardizing Network Mail Headers
574 Announcement of a Mail Facility at UCSB
577 Mail Priority
640 Revised FTP Reply Codes
644 On the Problem of Signature Authentication for Network Mail
706 On the Junk Mail Problem
751 SURVEY OF FTP MAIL AND MLFL
772 MAIL TRANSFER PROTOCOL
773 COMMENTS ON NCP/TCP MAIL SERVICE TRANSITION STRATEGY
rcf821.txt SIMPLE MAIL TRANSFER PROTOCOL (SMTP)
john_postel-mail_protocol_via_ftp-1977.txt
+722
788 SIMPLE MAIL TRANSFER PROTOCOL
} HISTORY OF MAIL
and put that in words as follows
Electronic mail exchange in general is a concept even older. The earli‐
est well documented electronic mail system was part of the Compatible
Time Sharing System (CTSS) at MIT, its MAIL command had been proposed in
a staff planning memo at the end of 1964 and was implemented in mid-1965
when Tom Van Vleck and Noel Morris wrote the necessary code. Similar
communication programs were built for other timesharing systems. One of
the most ambitious and influential was Murray Turoff’s EMISARI. Created
in 1971 for the United States Office of Emergency Preparedness, EMISARI
combined private electronic messages with a chat system, public postings,
voting, and a user directory.
During the 1960s it was common to connect a large number of terminals to
a single, central computer. Connecting two computers together was rela‐
tively unusual. This began to change with the development of the
ARPANET, the ancestor of today’s Internet. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson adapted
the SNDMSG program, originally developed for the University of California
at Berkeley timesharing system, to give it the ability to transmit a mes‐
sage across the network into the mailbox of a user on a different com‐
puter. For the first time it was necessary to specify the recipient’s
computer as well as an account name. Tomlinson decided that the under‐
used commercial at ‘@’ would work to separate the two.
Sending a message across the network was originally treated as a special
instance of transmitting a file, and so MAIL and MLFL commands were in‐
troduced with RFC 385 as an extension to the file transfer protocol FTP
of RFC 354, both in 1972. Until early 1973 many discussions and meetings
around FTP occurred, and whereas RFC 475 paved a way towards standardiza‐
tion of mail via FTP, RFC 524 proposed a specialized mail protocol, an
opinion that was officially picked up by the FTP RFC 542. Still, for
many years, ARPANET mail was sent via FTP.
Because it was not always clear when or where a message had come from,
RFC 561 in 1973 aimed to formalize electronic mail headers, including
“from”, “date”, and “subject”. In 1975 RFC 680 described fields to help
with the transmission of messages to multiple users, including “to”,
“cc”, and “bcc”. In 1977 these features and others went from best prac‐
tices to a binding standard in RFC 733. In September 1980, with RFC 772,
the M(ail) T(ransfer) P(rotocol) was introduced, which had “strong
similarities to portions of the File Transfer Protocol”. RFC 821 in Au‐
gust 1982 then introduced the refined S(imple) M(ail) T(ransfer) P(roto‐
col) in use, and usable, almost 42 years later, accompanied by RFC 822
that moved from “ARPA network text” to “internet text message”. Queen
Elizabeth II of England became the first head of state to send electronic
mail on March 26 1976 while ceremonially opening a building in the
British Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern.
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
