Replies

Re: Email

Prior to that, messaging only worked if both the sender and recipient were working on the same computer.

Actually, you're also forgetting about the Internet "Bang Paths," when email was sent over the Internet using UUCP (pre-SMTP days.)

You needed to know the route the email message needed to take in order to get from your computer to the destination as well. It wasn't unusual for email routing messages to require being routed through as many as 10 different systems, and sometimes even more. Of course, that was way berfore the concepts of RFC821 and RFC822 (smtp messaging and smtp format records) and "mx" records in DNS simplified things tremendously.

There have been so many people who worked on Internet email it's really pretty staggering.

Mark

You’re quite right to mention UUCP. I do remember using bang-paths, and asking around “Anybody got a route from here to there?” My first experience with “real” email was VAXmail on VMS (on a VAX-11/780 at Cornell) but that’s kind of a dim memory at this point. UUCP was a kludge but it was what we had until DNS and routing took hold. Having to tell the modem to dial up to the mail server to get/send messages.

Ah, those were the days.... NOT :-)

At the other end of the spectrum, I don’t know if I’ll live to see the 32-bit Unix time roll over (I’ll have just turned 86) but I’m quite sure that we’ll still be using some Unix/Linux variant at that time. Whether Windows or MacOS will survive that long is a different question.