On 20250509 06:14:59, Matija Nalis wrote:
On Fri, May 09, 2025 at 03:32:58AM -0700, jdow wrote:
On 20250509 02:46:14, Matija Nalis wrote:
Not only did people fully expect that e-mail they sent would be
delivered, they would expected it would be delivered promptly.
If it even got delayed by few hours, that was considered a serious
problem, and a reason to call up the postmaster on another side and
inform them to fix their system.
Please excuse me, but what world do you live in? Since day one email
Earth, more precisely Europe. And you?
That's debatable. I was brought up on Earth.
delivery has been best effort and not guaranteed, even on (some) RBBS
systems running on the likes of CP/M on 8080s before ARPANET and all that
fuzz.
Didn't ARPANET predate 8080 processors but good half a decade?
About. But, curiosity led me to some old documentation.
While I'm not familiar with RBBS specifically, other BBS software I
used (like PCBoard) did guarantee message delivery. Only way a
message could be lost if there was total system crash (usually
hardware loss), and in that case (I've lived through few), you'd
still get a prominent system board notice about the loss next time
you logged on, or inability to log on (if the BSS went out of service
permanently). So you'd know your message wasn't delivered in any
case.
Or the recipient could never get around to reading it.
I will give you one thing, the post office supposedly always delivers. But, they
don't. Thieves get into mailboxes. And recognized spam finds its way into the
trash "received" but unread. Any email system is very likely to suffer this same
problem as thieves improve their hacking techniques. That's just one way things
could go wrong. Do you presume PCBoard had no bugs or is that a demonstrated fact?
'nuf said on my part. Take your parting shot if you will.
{^_^}
