[TUHS] mh/hm, mmh
Mary Ann Horton
mah at mhorton.net
Mon Jun 1 03:28:56 AEST 2020
What a wonderful historical tour, Clem! Thank you!
On 5/31/20 7:53 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> MH used a new Mailbox (on-disk) scheme and formatted all messages in
> RFC733 form with addresses being flat an in the form: user at 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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