3 ms·

Actually, there was a better mail user's shell, mush[1], that was ultimately murdered by its insane license[2] which forbade any modification to the source; I r

by cduzz 4y ago

Actually, there was a better mail user's shell, mush[1], that was ultimately murdered by its insane license[2] which forbade any modification to the source; I remember trying to puzzle through how to apply the various patches I'd found to make it compile and then do useful things. Sad, but a good lesson in how a bad license on good code kills the program. (links to the netbsd copy of the code since I can't find a more reasonable project home, likely because terrible license) 1. http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/mail/mush/index.html http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/mail/mush/in... 2. http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/licenses/mush-license http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/licenses/mus...

em-bee 4y ago
i'd think the primary killer for mush would be the authors refusal to allow porting to X11
cylinder714 4y ago
Dan (mush's author) went on to start Z-Mail, a commercial GUI mail client, using mush as its basis, which likely explains the restrictive license. SGI eventually bundled Z-Mail with IRIX, which is why I scored an Indigo workstation when Dan hired me away from SCO in the early 1990s to help support it. I'm not sure when Z-Mail Lite, the TUI version, was introduced, but I eventually made it my speciality because I fell in love with its speed. To this day, I detest web-based email clients; at a later gig, Windows ports of Pine, Vim and par, an awesome paragraph formatter, made life with Windows bearable. Dan eventually sold out to Judy Estrin at NCD, maker of X terminals and, later, X servers for Windows. Then NCD sold out to NetManage, then I left and eventually made my way to Netscape (post-IPO, sadly) to support their email server product.
- zvr 4y ago
  Thanks for this trip down memory lane. I definitely remember discovering Z-mail on an SGI machine and being fascinated with the programming/extensibility of it. Around the same time I also discovered mh and exmh (the Tcl/Tk interface), which also were very extensible. Eventually I ended up using mutt for the last countless years...
- cylinder714 4y ago
  Urk—the company was "Z-Code Software," the product was "Z-Mail." How embarrassing....

by cduzz 4y ago

em-bee 4y ago

i'd think the primary killer for mush would be the authors refusal to allow porting to X11

cylinder714 4y ago

Dan (mush's author) went on to start Z-Mail, a commercial GUI mail client, using mush as its basis, which likely explains the restrictive license. SGI eventually bundled Z-Mail with IRIX, which is why I scored an Indigo workstation when Dan hired me away from SCO in the early 1990s to help support it. I'm not sure when Z-Mail Lite, the TUI version, was introduced, but I eventually made it my speciality because I fell in love with its speed. To this day, I detest web-based email clients; at a later gig, Windows ports of Pine, Vim and par, an awesome paragraph formatter, made life with Windows bearable. Dan eventually sold out to Judy Estrin at NCD, maker of X terminals and, later, X servers for Windows. Then NCD sold out to NetManage, then I left and eventually made my way to Netscape (post-IPO, sadly) to support their email server product.

zvr 4y ago
Thanks for this trip down memory lane. I definitely remember discovering Z-mail on an SGI machine and being fascinated with the programming/extensibility of it. Around the same time I also discovered mh and exmh (the Tcl/Tk interface), which also were very extensible. Eventually I ended up using mutt for the last countless years...
cylinder714 4y ago
Urk—the company was "Z-Code Software," the product was "Z-Mail." How embarrassing....