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About this: To: CBF at MIT-AI, EAK at MIT-AI, ED at MIT-AI, MOON ay MIT-AI Does anyone know if this is literally how they wrote email addresses in 1976? I
by lkrubner 2y ago
About this:
To: CBF at MIT-AI, EAK at MIT-AI, ED at MIT-AI, MOON ay MIT-AI
Does anyone know if this is literally how they wrote email addresses in 1976? Instead of using the @ symbol they typed the word "at"?
I realize this was before DNS was invented, so I am not surprised by the lack of TLD.
- gumby 2y agoWow, I know all those people on that recipient list! Yes, “ at “ was still in use. ISTR typing ‘@‘ but this was a long time ago (I didn’t get to the AI lab until ‘78 by when EMACS was well entrenched). This was pre TCP, pre RFC 733, pre DNS etc. I don’t remember if mail already had its own transport or if mail was still a special mode of the FTP protocol. I think that was still being argued over.
- hibbelig 2y agoUUCP?
- kragen 2y agomit-ai was running its, not unix, and there wasn't even a port of unix to the pdp-10 at the time. moreover uucp addresses are of the form host!user rather than user@host
- ForOldHack 2y agoIt was more of host_route!hop2!hop3!etc!user, You kept a list of routes on your terminal. Here is a very early map of the routers. https://groups.google.com/g/net.general/c/u1dxxNcTIX0/m/mHMWbCVJZswJ https://groups.google.com/g/net.general/c/u1dxxNcTIX0/m/mHMW...
- kragen 2y agoyeah, eventually, but in 01976 uucp was just getting started. even in 01978 i don't think they had a well-defined network map, though they said uucp already connected over 100 unix machines in the 7th edition manual. that post is from 01981 unfortunately 'show original message' is grayed out, so i can't actually see the map
- dredmorbius 2y agoTo clarify on account of kragen's idiosyncratic avoidance of uppercase, "its" is "ITS", the Incompatible Timesharing System, developed by MIT's AI Lab: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_Syste...>
- kragen 2y agooops, sorry, thanks
- p_l 2y agoUUCP was Unix only, and was only getting started around that time with more copies of Unix showing up outside of Bell Labs
- anyfoo 2y agoFor anyone who might not know, UUCP literally stands for "UNIX-to-UNIX copy". Of course, especially given its relative simplicity, at some point non-UNIX systems started to implement it (I think I maybe used some DOS package at some point).
- hibbelig 2y agoThank you. I wonder: is FTP that old? I kind of thought UUCP predated FTP. My parent mentioned email possibly being a special mode of FTP. _some poking around in Wikipedia_ Indeed, FTP is from 1971 and UUCP is from 1979. And the SMTP page describes that it all started as a mode in FTP.
- p_l 2y agoSMTP evolved as replacement for older approaches which, at one point, involved using FTP to mangle mailboxes remotely. Not so much a special mode for FTP as essentially an "use of" FTP. Similar to how non-trivial amounts of Electronic Data Interchange in business happens over FTP(S) to this day.
- amszmidt 2y agoUUCP was definitely not "Unix only", several operating systems supported it back in the day, Lisp Machines and ITS could access UUCP over Chaosnet. Mark Plotnick wrote the service (aka deamon) for Chaosnet for Unix in 1984.
- mrspuratic 2y agoUUCP used /bang paths/ where you had to know (one of possibly several) routes to the recipient's system... http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang-path.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang-path.html
- DonHopkins 2y agoWho needs UUCP when you have MLDEV! https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/mldev https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/mldev >MLDEV >The "ML Device" protocol is a remote file system invented for the PDP-10 MIT Incompatible Timesharing System. It may have been the very first transparent networking filesystem. >Build: Install libfuse-dev, then type make. >Usage: Create a mount point directory, and then mount an ITS file system like this: >sudo ./mount.mldev <hostname> <mountpoint> What are some early network file systems? https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/13709/what-are-some-early-network-file-systems https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/13709/wha... >I know it's always hard to define an exact first, so I'll just ask about early network file systems. To be more specific, I'm wondering about file systems that transparently present directories and files as if they were local. I don't consider FTP or similar mechanisms to be candidates. >For some time it has been my suspicion that the ITS "MLDEV" facility was very early ("the first"), but I never had any facts to back it up. I do have a file timestamped November 1972 that gives us an upper bound for the introduction of the facility. On the MIT-AI PDP-10, it provided an ML device (hence the name) which worked much like the local DSK device except the data was accessed through MIT's ARPANET IMP. MIT-ML of course had an AI device. >Present evidence is that ITS had a very early networked file system no later than 1972. >ITS has had a facility called the "ML Device", or MLDEV, for a long time. The name probably comes from a time when the users of the older more established computer called AI wanted access to files on the computer called ML. The "device" part is because ITS files are named by four parts: device, directory, and two file names. To access ML files from AI, the device name is ML. Conversely, from ML the AI device is used. >To date this facility, we can check timestamps from backup tapes. The earliest file called MLDEV is from July 1975. However, if we examine the source code for an earlier ITS version we see that it has built in ML and AI devices that when accessed starts a program called SYS; ATSIGN OTHER. Disassembling this file we can see that it indeed is accepting file operations and sends information across ARPANET. The earliest file with that name has a timestamp from November 1972. >We know from RFC documents 342, 344, and 366 that AI and ML were first put on the ARPANET in May-June 1972. So MLDEV could not have been in use before 1972. List of Chaos application protocols: https://gunkies.org/wiki/List_of_Chaos_application_protocols https://gunkies.org/wiki/List_of_Chaos_application_protocols
- gumby 2y ago
- gumby 2y agouucp would not be written until years later.
- DonHopkins 2y agoAny idea why there were @@'s in a lot of the messages? If you left @ as your TIP intercept character you had to type it twice, but only one @ would end up being sent. Those @@'s were in the email archive, and I can't remember ever seeing that before. Speaking of intercept characters, did you know Will Crowther, one of the authors of Adventure, wrote the "Users Guide to the Terminal IMP"? You're in a maze of twisty little IMPs! https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA014398.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA014398.pdf Don Woods, the other author of Adventure, is a great PostScript programmer! I worked with him at Sun on NeWS, but earlier he was DON@AI, so occasionally he'd get weird email intended for me. http://www.icynic.com/~don/ http://www.icynic.com/~don/ Here's his Spider card game for NeWS, entirely written in PostScript: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/news-tape/fun/spider/spider.ps https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/news-tape/fun/s... Maybe you could convert it to run in a laser printer, but it would sure use a lot of paper!
- gumby 2y ago> Any idea why there were @@'s in a lot of the messages? If you left @ as your TIP intercept character you had to type it twice, but only one @ would end up being sent. I don’t remember either. Could be an artifact of all the file translation over the years, or even early cruddy OCR. None of the folks in that list would have been using TIPs — ^R mode was added after KTVs were deployed.
- chimpanzee 2y ago>> The reason the mail looks funny is that it predates the Internet; some of what you see is Arpanet mail, and some (like the first one) is internal ITS mail. Two more curiosities: - The sender’s address uses two at-signs, like NAME@@DOMAIN. - There are typos where “at” is misspelled “ay”. Glad we don’t have to deal with that.
- llm_trw 2y ago>- The reason the mail looks funny is that it predates the Internet; some of what you see is Arpanet mail, and some (like the first one) is internal ITS mail. Looking at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc733 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc733 @ was already used behind the scenes in its current meaning, we're probably seeing a nicely human readable version of the emails sent. Note I did not have the time to read the whole RFC and the above may be wrong.
- ForOldHack 2y agoWhen I started on the internet, in 1987, there were still !(band) addresses. Not for long, but... compuserve had their own format, uwasau.fi was connected to the US internet. GNU (GNU trix Ha!)( before HURD) was distributed by magtape. TLG, The little garden was my ISP.
- TMWNN 2y ago> Does anyone know if this is literally how they wrote email addresses in 1976? Instead of using the @ symbol they typed the word "at"? In addition to what gumby wrote, CSAIL still maintains a `finger` server.
- gumby 2y agoBfox made the name field in gnu finger specifically long enough to fit my entire name.
- js2 2y agoAccording to RFC 561 ("Standardizing Network Mail Headers ", 1973) it was literally "at": We suggest that the text of network mail, whether transmitted over the FTP telnet connection (via the MAIL command) or over a separate data connection (with the MLFL command), be governed by the syntax below: Example: From: White at SRI-ARC Date: 24 JUL 1973 1527-PDT Subject: Multi-Site Journal Meeting Announcement NIC: 17996 At 10 AM Wednesday 25-JULY there will be a meeting to discuss a Multi-Site Journal in the context of the Utility. Y'all be here. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc561 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc561 RFC 733 (Standard for the Format of ARPA Network Text Messages, 1977) has examples of addresses in both formats and this note: Whenever a message might be transmitted or migrate to a host on another network, full hierarchical addresses must be specified. These are indicated as a series of words, separated by at-sign or "at" indications. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc733 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc733
- ta1243 2y ago> Date: 24 JUL 1973 1527-PDT Interesting. I thought Ameria preferred the "M-D-Y" order?
- ska 2y agoComputer scientists and similar have never liked it, so this isn’t surprising.
- anyfoo 2y agoYeah. And we ultimately all quickly settled on the ISO-like format YYYY-MM-DD (with optional and varying delimiters, it does not have to be exactly ISO), which makes the most sense of all because you can just lexicographically sort it (e.g. when listing file names).
- syncsynchalt 2y ago"dd MON yy" is US military format, and I can see early computer scientists adopting it for its inherent unambiguity (and also extending it to yyyy for reasons that became obvious). Americans colloquially prefer m/d/yy (slashes) rather than dashes, anyway.
- aragonite 2y agoRelevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Internet_email_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Internet_email_address
- kragen 2y agothat syntax still worked with standard sendmail configurations in the 01990s; i wouldn't be surprised if sendmail still implements it by default today, though things like gmail, microsoft exchange, postfix, and exim presumably don't, and qmail definitely doesn't
- _glass 2y agooff-topic, but I saw it now several times, why do you put a 0 in front of the 1990? I feel like I am being left-out of some insider joke.
- kragen 2y agono worries, https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-and-10k-compliance-at-home/ https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...
- hoosieree 2y agoYou kids with your newfangled "@" and "." emails. Looks like line noise. What is this, APL?
- epc 2y agouserid AT nodename was also common in the VM/CMS RSCS world of mainframes (and BITNET).