Mini-history of '@'

================================================================ BOB METCALFE: "From the Ether" InfoWorld.com December 14, 1999 ================================================================ OPEN-SOURCE SENDMAIL WELCOMES ITS COMMERCIAL COUSIN, SENDMAIL INC. LET'S START this week with some "open source" operating systems history. This will bring us from last week's letter of the week, lambda, to this week's, atsign (@). Then let's check on how open-source sendmail software, which uses atsign, is being leveraged by modern capitalists at Sendmail Inc. Now look, we had open-source computer operating systems in the 1970s. They included MIT's Multics, MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), Bolt Beranek and Newman's Tenex, and AT&T's Unix. For example, we ran Tenex at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center on our two clones of Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 minicomputers. But when minicomputers took off in the 1980s, it wasn't Multics, ITS, Tenex, or Unix that won out by freely proliferating their sources. Modern capitalists at Digital won in minicomputers by selling binaries of their proprietary VMS operating system, developed by the same David Cutler soon to deliver binaries of Windows 2000 from Microsoft. If you're an old programmer, you probably used atsign (@) back then to indicate indirect addressing in assembly languages. You wrote @1234 to tell your computer not to use 1234 as an operand address, but rather to use the address found in location 1234. I wrote a lot of PDP-10 atsigns in my day, and so did one Ray Tomlinson, who was working with Tenex in 1970 on early versions of Internet host software. Tomlinson wrote the Tenex software that composed, delivered, and read the first Internet e-mail. He doesn't remember what the first e-mail said, but we all remember what ASCII character Tomlinson chose to separate his e-mail address from the name of the server where his mailbox was kept. He chose atsign (@). Ray@BBN meant Ray at BBN. Over the next decade, name and mail protocols changed, but atsign persisted. And one Eric Allman led the development of sendmail, to this day the Internet's primary (75 percent) mail server software. [...] MORE METCALFE For a complete archive of his InfoWorld columns visit http://www.infoworld.com/opinions/morefromtheether.html