[TUHS] who invented the email attachment?

Doug McIlroy doug at cs.dartmouth.edu
Sun Mar 19 12:14:28 AEST 2017


> Should I make a claim to be the inventor of the email attachment?

uuencode was critical to attaching arbitrary files, and I am sure
one can find emails with uuencoded bits in them that read, "please
find attached ...". But they would have said the same thing if
what was being sent was source code. So attachment in that sense
obviously predated uuencode. But to identify that kind of
attachment with what mean by the word today is like identifying
cat with tar.

Doug



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