What a wonderful historical tour, Clem! Thank you!
MH's message/file format was also the inspiration for B news, which kept each Usenet message in a separate RFC733 format file. (The command line interface, however, was more like a feed, not separate shell commands.) No control-A separators, though, just separate files.MH used a new Mailbox (on-disk) scheme and formatted all messages in RFC733 form with addresses being flat an in the form: user@host. The new format, used a line a control-As followed by a nl, before and after the message. The headers of course where RFC733 (type: value with a trailing nl) and were separated from the body of the message by a single nl.
To clarify, I was joking when I mentioned Eric Schmidt as a possible author of delivermail. (I should have inserted a smiley.) I wasn't directly involved, as Eric Allman was in the Ingres project on a different system, but I thought he (Eric Allman) wrote delivermail, and so does Wikipedia. I think Kurt Shoens wrote only the MTA, but i could be mistaken.At some point in time, UCB built the 'Berk-net' (whose original code was written by ABC/Google's Eric Schmidt). BTW: Eric would have seen the Spider Network in his summers at BTL. The key thing with Berknet was cheap. It ran over 3 wire RS-232C between hosts at 9600 baud. Like UUCP was used to transfer files and email. Like UUCP it used a pre-fix addressing form: host:user ; but like RFC733 and unlike UUCP was flat.
Where Mary Ann and I differ in our memories is who wrote the original version of UCB's delivermail (8ucb) program. We both agree that it is possible it was Eric Schmidt, as the switch to using delivermail(8ucb) was were Berknet was spliced into the email namespace. I had thought Kurt wrote it, Mary Ann thought it was Eric Allman. We agree Eric Allman was hacking on it for the Ing70. For this response, it doesn't really matter other than to try to get the history right, because it does not matter for the Rand Mail subsystem.
Anyway around this time, the curses library was created by Ken Arnold (originally to support Rogue) by pulling the screen code out of vi and using Mary Ann's termcap stuff.
I didn't write termcap, Bill Joy did. I wrote terminfo, but that was later when I was at Bell Labs in 1982. Ken's curses used termcap, my 1982 rewrite used terminfo.
Mary Ann