
The History of Email (2017) - colinprince
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-email/
======
gumby
> An early alternative to Unix called Tenex

Ahem. Tenex ran on the PDP-10 (a mini mainframe for its time with a 36-bit
word). Ritchie and Thompson were at that time still working for the Multics
project (on a 36-bit architecture) and started writing Unix much later when
they returned to Bell Labs (writing it on a smaller machine, PDP-7 and later
PDP-11).

> the Tenex team had just gotten access to the ARPANET

Umm, the ARPANET IMPs were _developed_ by BBN where Bobrow and Murphy were
developing Tenex. ARPA was also interested in architecture and OS
standardization at that time, in order to simplify research collaboration.

> FTP originally didn’t include support for email. Around the time it was
> updated to use TCP (rather than the NCP protocol which ARPANET historically
> used) the MAIL command was added.

Actually the mail command, as you even link to, was added in RFC 385 in 1972;
the first TCP RFC was RFC 793 almost a decade later.

(it's "the arpanet" by the way, being the network funded by ARPA, not some
network named "arpanet" as, say, CSNET was).

TECO did not _become_ Emacs but Emacs was _written_ in TECO from around 76
(IIRC it started last Gene Ciccarelli's TECO init file).

RFC733 had nothing to do with how messages are stored on disk.

Etc. I stopped after that.

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zackbloom
Author here, cool seeing this on HN. If you'd like another history, here's one
on stock quotes which also forms a nice history of sending data far away:
[https://blog.cloudflare.com/history-of-stock-
quotes/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/history-of-stock-quotes/)

~~~
anitil
I love reading these sorts of things. Working my way through the stock ticker
article now

It was a nice touch seeing some of the comments:

> Expect lawsuit from Shiva Ayyadurai.

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ksec
I read the headline and I thought may be Cloudflare will be getting into Email
Space too.

And but doesn't seems to be the case. And none of Cloudflare's product or
services has anything to do with email.

So what was the purpose of the article from CloudFlare's perspective?

