
Obituary, for Ray Tomlinson and Email - jcrawfordor
https://jbcrawford.us/blog/essays/email/
======
dalke
I think The Verge and others are wrong about Tomlinson being “the savior of
the @ sign”. The commercial-at was part of ASCII, and on standard keyboards in
the 1950s.

In the ANSI standardization process in the 1960s there was a long debate over
which characters to use. Other options included the ±, √, and ° symbols, and
typewriter keyboards at the time also included ¢, ½, and ¼. For some reason,
"@" was deemed more important than those alternatives, which makes it hard to
say it's 10°C outside using 7-bit ASCII.

I can't come up with any mechanism whereby "@" would have needed saving. It's
not like "|" has much popularity, but it still hangs on. Who "saved" "|"? For
that matter, did Twitter save '#'?

But that's not my primary comment. This piece, like many other recent articles
on the topic, omit a key part of email - UUCP-based email. The obituary
assumes "your mail server will consult the DNS", but DNS didn't exist until
the early 1980s - years after UUCP was developed to send email between
computers that weren't connected full-time to a network or each other.

Instead, many would schedule late-night telephone calls, when the long-
distance rates were cheaper, and transfer messages in batches.

You would have to route messages manually. A UUCP email address might be
"mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko", where mcvax was well-enough known that
others knew how to send email there, and it would eventually get forwarded to
the chernenko mailbox on kremvax. In this context, "kremvax" wasn't globally
unique, but only "the kremvax known to moskvax" and "the moskvax known to
mcvax", etc.

Nowadays this might be "chernenko@kremvax.su", but that requires a centralized
globally unique resolvable MX record.

I think it's important to mention this because the obituary article compared
federated to non-federated systems. The bang path mechanism shows that it's
possible to be even more federated than SMTP over DNS MX records. As a
consequence, it can potentially deliver email through USB memory sticks to
remote sites or behind network firewalls ... or the Iron Curtain. :)

~~~
DrScump
<You would have to route messages manually. A UUCP email address might be
"mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko", where mcvax was well-enough known that
others knew how to send email there...>

Or, the convention for giving multiple "well-known host" options was
"{preferred|alt1|alt2...}!mailhost!username"

In 1987ish, I was the first in my company to think to request my email address
on my business cards: "{pyramid|decwrl|uunet}!infmx!aland"

~~~
dalke
True. The full context of the 1-Apr-84 message I used for the above example
ends:

    
    
        And now, let's open a flask of Vodka and have a drink on our entry on
        this network. So:
        
        			NA ZDAROVJE!
    
        -- 
        	K. Chernenko, Moscow, USSR
        	...{decvax,philabs}!mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko

