email was Mac something something

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, Tom Jennings wrote:

> > What we're trying to find out, on two threads now, is how life
> > was before registered domain names.  It would be nice to
> > see what a full email header looked like before 1985.
>
> Sorry, but you have the cart before the horse there. Hidden
> "header" implies RFC822 et al, but "email" not very broadly
> defined, doesn't require 'internet email' at all. It's not a
> semantic game.  822 type mail was simply "the winner" but the
> field was and still is large.
>
> Its valid to take the current most-popular, rfc822, and trace it's
> history back, but that won't show you all the things that went
> before, only those in that thread, and even that requires throwing
> out a lot of hard-to-categorize systems and techniques, and you
> can't call the resulting story "the story of email". It's common
> to do that sort of thing, but it's wrong.

This got me thinking.  I can make a really good argument (at some point,
not now, no time) that e-mail could never have gotten as big (universal,
nearly ubiquitous, one common standard) as it did without the modern
(1990+) Internet, which could not have gotten where it is today with
Linux.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

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