12 Mar
2017
12 Mar
'17
7:53 p.m.
On 11 Mar 2017, at 19:07, Mary Ann Horton
<mah(a)mhorton.net> wrote:
When MIME came out in 1992 I became a champion of SMTP/MIME as a standard - it was a big
improvement. But uuencod predated MIME by 12 years.
Somewhere I may have a copy of a rant I wrote in about 1995 called 'MIME as a disease
vector'. It argued that the single biggest thing that MIME did was to establish the
Windows/Office monopoly, and that this was why MS were so enthusiastic about it. It did
this by making it trivial for a Windows user to send documents in Office formats which, if
you wanted to read or modify them, required you to use Windows. Thus the disease
(proprietary formats and monopolies) was effectively spread by MIME.
I still think it's essentially correct, although I would not now use such loaded
wording, and also clearly this was just inevitable: MIME or some equivalent way of sending
typed binary data by email was useful, and this undesirable consequence unavoidable.
Looking at things from the other side of the Windows monopoly period it all looks less
horrible as well: Windows didn't end up killing Unix even.
--tm