12 Mar
2017
12 Mar
'17
11:42 p.m.
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> 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