I was working in academia when standards like MIME were being hammered out.
The university where I worked was a major Internet hub. (Also a BITNET
hub for those who remember that, DECNET too for that region.)
So the developments were kind of important to us.
> Color me slightly amazed that this far into the email adventure*
we're still dealing with weirdness like this!
Ya think?!?!
Some might say that AOL brought email to the consumers, but that would
mean ignoring Compuserve.
Oh ... but AOL bought them. So does that give them the claim? [sigh]
Now ... AOL did give us a fun early "interactive messaging" service.
But that too was inspired by fore runners: the guy managing the team
which cooked up AIM (AOL IM) had also been in academia running VM and
Unix-on-VM (Amdahl UTS).
As it happens, I was chatting with colleagues just yesterday about this
topic: This particular dude wired-in BITNET interactive messaging to UTS
(hosted by VM/HPO). Later he left academia to join some Virginia
start-up called America Online. He and another VMer had done such things
as (remember BITNET II?) BITNET 1/2. Those were the days, my friends.
"We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus
and running code."
-- Dave Clark, IETF, 1992
On 3/5/25 9:52 AM, Phil Smith III wrote:
Giul asked:
Peter F: Why did you double-space the matter quoted in hour reply?
It's distracting. (I cleaned it up.)
Various email services, including Gmail, tend to show hard linebreaks as double
spaced. I have an Outlook macro that converts hard to soft for this reason, and
run it when I remember to before posting.
Color me slightly amazed that this far into the email adventure* we're still
dealing with weirdness like this!
...phsiii
*A few years ago on a local forum I made a reference to email in 1980 and some
whippersnapper tried to claim that "AOL invented email". I larfed.
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