Tales of Ancient E-Mail

<<<much deletia about early "first" email systems>>> OK, The first liar doesn't get a chance. Back in the 60's, Tymshare (the company) had a bunch of SDS (later XDS) 940 boxes and they DID have a "mail" command. The problem was that they only could mail between accounts on the same machine. Yes, it was an early form of email, but not routed between machines, only local use. While I don't know about other machines of the era (mostly time sharing boxes) and their "mail" commands, this machine DID have one. I found out (the hard way) that the messages were limited to a few characters (around 300 or so), but since you could share files between "accounts" (file systems were limited in the day), it could be useful to supply pointers to larger things. Thankfully this was before SPAM existed, as we only used mail for "proper" things. Other examples of machines of the day: pdp-6/10, IBM360, GE 235/635. I don't know about what was used on the pdp-6/10 (I have a bit of contact, but not much), but I don't remember any mail commands for IBM360's or the GE machines. (Claim to fame: I've used email in 5 different decades!) -- Tom Watson tsw at johana.com __________________________________________________________________________________________ Check out the New Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done faster. (http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbeta)