strangest systems I've sent email from

[Dave Wade]

Well the first E-Mail I sent was from a Honeywell L66/60 running GCOS and
TSS sometime around 1985. Aberdeen University had written a "Greybook"
mailer in "B". Greybook was basically RFC822 e-mail with three
modifications: -

1. It used revered "big endian" names, so "uk.ac.nerc" as opposed to the
modern "nerc.ac.uk".
2. It allowed "BST" or "British Summer Time" as a time zone.
3. It ran over the "Yellow Book Transport Service" which in turn ran over an
x.25 network.

The required an X.25 link which was provided by a PDP/11 running RSX11M.
This connected to the L66 via a Synchronous line. I don't honestly remember
how this worked on the Honeywell. The e-mails could be sent to several UK
Universities over the Janet X.25 network. We could also send to Bitnet using
a gateway which I think was at UCL. There is some information about the
state of E-Mail here:-

http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/ccd/networking/bryant/p05.htm

I was the system programmer who installed and maintained the software from
Aberdeen. Later on I installed similar software on an IBM4381 and went on to
work on the IBM implementation for Salford University, who wrote it
initially at IBM's Manchester office on a 4361 and later in Salford
University on IBM kit loaned to use...


Dave Wade
G4UGM