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

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@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