[TUHS] Berkeley CSRG Building

[Clem Cole]

thank you.
ᐧ

On Fri, Aug 16, 2024 at 5:08 PM Eric Allman <tuhs at eric.allman.name> wrote:

> Clem, normally your history is completely accurate, but this time I need
> to provide a few corrections.
> On 2024-08-12 10:34, Clem Cole wrote:
>
> csh et al.).   Bob later ran a serial line up the stairwells of Cory and
> picked up the Ingres and the first CAD machine.  Kurt Shoens, who was the
> primary UCB Mail author, hacked the Berknet support into his work.  One of
> his primary additions was removing the "delivery" part of the mail into a
> separate program - that he called "delivermail."
>
> Actually, I'm the one who separated the delivery into another program that
> was indeed called "delivermail". I modified /bin/mail to do actual delivery
> if it was invoked with -d, otherwise call delivermail. I took out the hacks
> for networks such as UUCP and moved them to delivermail.
>
>
> Eric Alman was the system administrator of Ing70, so Eric hacked
> delivermail to pass email to and from the Berknet to the ARPANET.  All
> was good until Ernie covax showed up and was connected to the UUCP net ;-)
>
> That part is correct. In fact, the ARPANET was the reason for delivermail
> in the first place. The BerkNet hacks had already been done to /bin/mail, I
> think by Eric Schmidt.
>
>
> 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.
>
> Don't forget DECnet (host::user) and things like some mercifully dead UK
> network that reversed the domain names, so this mailing list would be
> "tuhs at org.tuhs" <tuhs at org.tuhs>. And the compiled in configuration that
> delivermail used was becoming unwieldy as the world get bigger, hence a
> configuration file.
>
> But the real reason for sendmail was the advent of the Internet, which
> used an entirely new mail protocol called SMTP. That required implementing
> queuing and better error reporting than returning an exit status. Bill Joy
> talked me into it because "you know mail better than anyone around here." I
> didn't expect it to turn into the cornerstone of my professional life.
> There are more stories there, but they are off topic.
>
> eric
>
>
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