Re: [TUHS] mh/hm, mmh

Ah, time for some "Email at Berkeley" history.... First the back story.  In the beginning, /bin/mail was the mail system.  All mail was local to one machine so the distinction between MUA, MTA, and MSA (Mail Storage Agent) didn't exist.  At this point there were no options, at least at Berkeley, although I suspect that Bruce was working on MH by then. If my memory serves, networking at Berkeley started with BerkNET.  Clem got it right: Eric Schmidt wrote it, and it was designed to be cheap.  The main purpose was that Berkeley was getting more Unix machines and carrying tapes was problematic.  It was purely batch (no interactive sessions; file copy and email only) and ran over 9600 baud TTY lines.  Eric hacked /bin/mail to do the appropriate calls if it saw a colon in the address, so the flow of a typical message would be keyboard → /bin/mail → BerkNET → /bin/mail → /var/mail. In about 1976 the INGRES project at Berkeley got an ARPAnet connection.  6th Edition was current then, and we got the software from (iirc) UC San Diego.  It was kind of a mess, but it did work.  It was a VDH (Very Distant Host) interface running at 9600 baud.  But the mail system it included, MSG I think, was a world unto itself, and definitely did not use /bin/mail.  So now we had two universes: to send something to both someone on BerkNET and someone on ARPAnet you had to type the message into two different MUAs.  But at first this was good enough.  But not for long. The problem was that to use the ARPAnet you had to be logged into our PDP-11/70.  Back then the cool kids had "glass TTYs" (i.e., adm3a).  But BerkNET didn't have interactive connections, so you had to actually have a TTY line into our machine.  Two problems arose: first, INGRES was in a different building (Cory Hall) than the rest of the department (Evans Hall).  But that's OK, there were already wires running between the two buildings that were probably inspired by BerkNET.  Second, our PDP-11 had a single DH-11 multiport interface with 16 ports.  Only two of those ports were available, and new DH-11s cost on the order of $15,000, money which we did not have. But no problem.  At this point there was already a "plug board" in the mail room in Evans that had ports to the half dozen or so machines that were by then on campus and lines to each office.  To connect you would plug in a wire between the machine you wanted to use and your office.  Protocol was that you remove the cross connect after use, but that was widely ignored.  Ing70 ports were quite frequently being pulled out while in use and no one was happy.  Unfortunately since I was kind of managing that machine, I was the one who got yelled at. Also in that period Berkeley got connected into UUCP.  UUCP had also done a hack to /bin/mail, so it was becoming quite the big mess.  I made the observation that I could hack /bin/mail to forward messages with an "@" sign in the address to our ARPAnet-connected machine, but at that point the code was becoming unwieldy.  Enter delivermail, which was essentially what we now call an MTA.  It was still a hack, but it was easier to deal with because it didn't have MUA and MSA functionality.  I changed /bin/mail to call delivermail unless it got a "-d" (deliver) flag, so now the sequence for local mail was /bin/mail → delivermail → /bin/mail -d → /var/mail.  And most importantly, I hacked the ARPAnet code to use delivermail as well, so now Ing70 could forward mail from BerkNET to ARPAnet and back again.  The fights over our two plug board ports mostly dissipated and my life got better. I'm pretty sure that at this point Kurt Schoens was working on Mail.  He read /var/mail (at that point it had been migrated to /var/spool/mail) directly, so there was no hiding of the mailbox format, so he had MUA + a half of an MSA.  He converted Mail to use delivermail for outgoing mail.  I don't recall the details of how MH got hooked in, but it did have a separate program for sending (called "send" I think) that would have been fairly easy to hack.  It still had "inc" (incorporate) to bring mail from the /var/mail one-file-per-mailbox format into the MH one-file-per-message format, so the three functions were not completely broken out, but it was really the closest to that ideal model available at the time, so far as I know. That's the gist of that story.  Sendmail is a completely different story, driven by the onset of the Internet, and I won't make this already long message even longer by going into it here. By the way, I have a 9-track tape sent to me by Marshall Rose containing the November 1983 version of MH that UCI did (based on the Rand system), complete with original versions of the documentation.  If anyone has any way of reading it I'm happy to pass it on. eric