31 May
2020
31 May
'20
11:28 p.m.
What a wonderful historical tour, Clem! Thank you!
On 5/31/20 7:53 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
MH used a new Mailbox (on-disk) scheme and formatted
all messages in
RFC733 form with addresses being flat an in the form: user@host. The
new format, used a line a control-As followed by a nl, before and
after the message. The headers of course where RFC733 (type: value
with a trailing nl) and were separated from the body of the message by
a single nl.
MH's message/file format was also the inspiration for B news,
which kept
each Usenet message in a separate RFC733 format file. (The command line
interface, however, was more like a feed, not separate shell commands.)
No control-A separators, though, just separate files.
At some point in time, UCB built the
'Berk-net' (whose original code
was written by ABC/Google's Eric Schmidt). BTW: Eric would have seen
the Spider Network in his summers at BTL. The key thing with Berknet
was cheap. It ran over 3 wire RS-232C between hosts at 9600 baud.
Like UUCP was used to transfer files and email. Like UUCP it used
a pre-fix addressing form: host:user ; but like RFC733 and unlike UUCP
was flat.
Where Mary Ann and I differ in our memories is who wrote the original
version of UCB's delivermail (8ucb) program. We both agree that it
is possible it was Eric Schmidt, as the switch to using
delivermail(8ucb) was were Berknet was spliced into the email
namespace. I had thought Kurt wrote it, Mary Ann thought it was Eric
Allman. We agree Eric Allman was hacking on it for the Ing70. For
this response, it doesn't really matter other than to try to get the
history right, because it does not matter for the Rand Mail subsystem.
To clarify,
I was joking when I mentioned Eric Schmidt as a possible
author of delivermail. (I should have inserted a smiley.) I wasn't
directly involved, as Eric Allman was in the Ingres project on a
different system, but I thought he (Eric Allman) wrote delivermail, and
so does Wikipedia. I think Kurt Shoens wrote only the MTA, but i could
be mistaken.
Anyway around this time, the curses library was
created by Ken Arnold
(originally to support Rogue) by pulling the screen code out of vi and
using Mary Ann's termcap stuff.
I didn't write termcap, Bill Joy did. I wrote terminfo, but that was
later when I was at Bell Labs in 1982. Ken's curses used termcap, my
1982 rewrite used terminfo.
Mary Ann