12 Jan
2005
12 Jan
'05
9:18 a.m.
On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, Tom Jennings wrote:
This got me thinking. I can make a really good argument (at some point,
not now, no time) that e-mail could never have gotten as big (universal,
nearly ubiquitous, one common standard) as it did without the modern
(1990+) Internet, which could not have gotten where it is today with
Linux.
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What we're
trying to find out, on two threads now, is how life
was before registered domain names. It would be nice to
see what a full email header looked like before 1985.
Sorry, but you have the cart before the horse there. Hidden
"header" implies RFC822 et al, but "email" not very broadly
defined, doesn't require 'internet email' at all. It's not a
semantic game. 822 type mail was simply "the winner" but the
field was and still is large.
Its valid to take the current most-popular, rfc822, and trace it's
history back, but that won't show you all the things that went
before, only those in that thread, and even that requires throwing
out a lot of hard-to-categorize systems and techniques, and you
can't call the resulting story "the story of email". It's common
to do that sort of thing, but it's wrong.