13 Mar
2017
13 Mar
'17
5:35 a.m.
That's interesting, Clem. It would be useful to date the real date of
the first email attachment sent. Right now the only firm date we have
is 6/1/80. Do you have any old email or copy of uuencode that could
establish an earlier date?
Thanks,
Mary Ann
On 03/12/2017 10:42 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
I think it might actually predates 6/1/80 by 6-9
months because I was
at Tek a year earlier and you and I started corresponding that first
summer I was at Tek. I remember that you had sent me a copy of it
shortly after you wrote it. So I think there is a chance that that
might be a slightly later version.
Clem
On Sat, Mar 11, 2017 at 2:07 PM, Mary Ann Horton <mah(a)mhorton.net
<mailto:mah@mhorton.net>> wrote:
I just heard from a historian named Piotr Klaban with an
interesting historical sidelight.
Apparently today 3/11/17 is being publicized as the 25th
anniversary of the email attachment, citing Nat Borenstein's
MIME. Piotr points out that uuencode predates MIME, and he's right.
I checked and, while I don't have any email archives from that
time frame at Berkeley, I was able to find the 4BSD archive on
minnie that dates the uuencode.1c man page at 6/1/80. We didn't
call them attachments back then, just sending binary files by
email. (Prior to then it was common to just include the text of
the file raw in the email, which only worked for ASCII files.) It
was a few years later when cc:Mail and Microsoft Mail started
calling uuencoded files embedded in email "attachments".
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.
Mary Ann