[TUHS] Mailer History -- was Berkeley CSRG Building

[Clem Cole]

s/to detail/to deal with/ - I hate autocorrect
ᐧ

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 2:50 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>
> On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 2:18 PM Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen at sdaoden.eu>
> wrote:
>
>> Depending on what you mean by "at that point" i think here you
>> misremember.  (To the contrary 733 and also 822 allow practically
>> anything
>>
> Page 3 of SMTPD -- RFC 821 [which the 822 sits on top of says]:
>
> "Commands and Replies are composed of characters from the ASCII character
> set.  When a transport service provides an 8-bit byte (octet) transmission
> channel, each 7-bit character  is transmitted right justified in an octet
> with the *high order bit cleared to zero*"
>
>
> BTW, this was specified in 821 because it had been a factor in earlier
> experience of the ARPANET [733 and using FTP as a mail transport, which was
> how much of this all started], and binary was explicitly not allowed.   822
> force 7-bit ASCII because of the earlier issues of things like CDC's
> display code (what a nightmare), much less EBCDIC.  The key was that those
> of us in the ARPANET community could not allow "anything," - but we did
> have to detail what was there.
>
> Some of us lived in this world and wrote programs that dealt with those
> constraints at the time.  I am relaying to you what it was and how it
> happened.  As I said, we have what we have because that was what we were
> living with -- two distinct worlds, the ARPANET community - which was
> setting the standards for interchange, and UNIX (USENET), which was de
> facto and growing because it cost little to join it.
>
>
>> As a remark, the MBOX format as standardized by POSIX decades ago
>>
> Ouch -- I was part of POSIX and /usr/group before that. And had
> >>nothing<< to do with it.   The POSIX definition was at least 15 years
> After Bruce wrote MH and Kurt did delivermail and if I count I >>suspect<<
> it is correctly closer to 20-25.  mbox was created I believe by Ken (Doug
> do you remember?), but I'm not sure who actually wrote the original "mail"
> program for Fifth edition (maybe Fourth) - which as I said was both an MUI
> and a MTA.   But that development was over 15 yrs before we started the
> /usr/group standard, much less the POSIX ones.
>
> You are probably correct that until it was formally specified in the POSIX
> definition, the format was defined originally in Ken's code, then Kurt's
> and finally in Eric's.   IIRC, Bruce actually had a man page in MH that
> described his format that used the ^A characters, but I would have to
> rummage through old sources to be 100% certain.  Certainly, later
> distributions of it did describe it, and MMDF may have also - but I'm not
> sure.
>
> BTW: by about 4.2BSD time (maybe a little earlier), particularly because
> of sendmail - the MH system (which had left Rand and was then being
> supported by someone else ??UC Irvine maybe??) had been hacked to handle
> the mbox format
>
>
> ᐧ
>
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