On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 4:47 PM, Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:

Wait, are you saying that qmail was written as a replacement for PMDF? Or that you used qmail as your replacement for PMDF?

Unclear - why Borstein does anything in my mind. Best I can tell he wrote because he (and a lot of us) disliked sendmail. I think he felt MMDF was too much of a mess by that point and it was time to start over. He had already did a replacement for bind. But it would have primarily been a replacement for MMDF I would have thought --- PMDF originally was written in Pascal for VMS, although PMDF might have been moved back to UNIX by then. The dates are fuzzy.

"In 1999 PMDF was translated from Pascal to C. The C version of PMDF became the basis of the Sun Java System Messaging Server of Sun Microsystems"

My memory is hazy, I seem to remember there was one more heavy weight mail system after MMDF for UNIX that came from the Brits in the 1980s/early 90s in the same vein who's name I can not think of. That must have been PMDF now that I think about it. Simon Rosenthal was one of guys involved in it. He did the support for what it was for us at LCC. Thinking about it, we must have been running that version at Locus before I went to DEC. If I can find Simon or the other Andy Tannenbaum (trb), I'll ask them if either of them remembers. But I can say the date has to be wrong on this quote you mention. I would think the translation from Pascal back to C would have been 10 year earlier and that would make more sense. By 1999, I had left LCC. As I said, Simon would be a good person to ask if I can dig him up.

I wouldn't bet that (the C version of) PMDF was reimplemented in Java just because the name contained Java. I seem to recall Sun putting Java in the name of many products at the time.

Right....

Clem