[TUHS] Berkeley CSRG Building

[Phil Budne]

arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> > Eric refers to that time as "the email format of the week" and sendmail was
> > created to allow him to more easily handle the different formats.  By then
> > there was the DARPA 733/822 format (user at host), Berknet (host:user), UUCP
> > (host1!host2...!hostn!user) being sources at UCB, as well as crap showing
> > up from the IBM Educational System, CSNET and various other places trying
> > be exchanged.
>
> Small correction. CSNet didn't happen until the mid-80s, by which time
> sendmail was firmly entrenched in the BSD world. Circa 1987/1988, I was
> the Unix sysadmin at Emory U., and we got a CSNet connection via Georgia
> Tech. It required a leased X.25 (!) line and a special board to put
> in one of our Vaxen. There was a driver for it for 4.2BSD but we were
> running 4.3. Ron Hutchins at GT and I ported it over to 4.3BSD.

CSNet had a dialup POTS based service, PhoneNet, using MMDF.  I think
that was Boston University's 4.2BSD VAX 11/780's primary email
connection until we got an Internet connection via Cypress(*) c. 1986,
initially using an 11/725 (a re-packaged 11/730), running, I think,
Ultrix.

Back in the day, global email was a maze of twisty passages with
gateways between the worlds of The ARPANET, BITNET, UUCP, CSNet, etc,
and which required excruciating navigation with percent signs used for
manual routing, tho sendmail configs would route user at host.BITNET etc
to the right gateway with the right incantation.  Often, but not
always, a simple reply would work, but sometimes the rewrites didn't
get the sender address right...

(*) https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1565&context=cstech