7 ms·

Wow, 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 un

by gumby 2y ago

Wow, 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 ago
UUCP?
- kragen 2y ago
  mit-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 ago
    It 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 ago
      yeah, 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 ago
    To 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 ago
      oops, sorry, thanks
- p_l 2y ago
  UUCP was Unix only, and was only getting started around that time with more copies of Unix showing up outside of Bell Labs
  - anyfoo 2y ago
    For 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 ago
    Thank 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 ago
      SMTP 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 ago
    UUCP 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 ago
  UUCP 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 ago
  Who 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 ago
  uucp would not be written until years later.
DonHopkins 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. 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.

by gumby 2y ago

hibbelig 2y ago

UUCP?

kragen 2y ago
mit-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 ago
  It 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 ago
    yeah, 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 ago
  To 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 ago
    oops, sorry, thanks
p_l 2y ago
UUCP was Unix only, and was only getting started around that time with more copies of Unix showing up outside of Bell Labs
- anyfoo 2y ago
  For 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 ago
  Thank 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 ago
    SMTP 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 ago
  UUCP 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 ago
UUCP 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 ago
Who 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 ago
uucp would not be written until years later.

DonHopkins 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. 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.