http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html
The History of Electronic Mail
by Tom Van Vleck
"Computer mail and messaging have probably been independently invented many times. I do not know who first invented these applications, and I haven't found any documented versions that precede the ones I helped create in 1965. This note describes my knowledge of the history of electronic mail and instant messaging.
"(I don't really like to use the term "e-mail" or "email." I usually just call it "mail." The use of electrons for mail may someday become quaint, replaced by photons or quarks; should we prepare to speak of "p-mail" or "q-mail"?)
CTSS
"The Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) was begun at the MIT Computation Center in 1961. By 1965, there were hundreds of registered users from MIT and other New England colleges, and CTSS service was provided every day to up to 30 simultaneous users on each of the Computation Center and Project MAC IBM 7094s.
"CTSS allowed users to log into MIT's IBM 7094 from remote dial-up terminals, and to store files online on disk. This new ability encouraged users to share information in new ways. When geographically separated CTSS users wanted to pass messages to each other, they sometimes created files with names like TO TOM and put them in "common file" directories, e.g. M1416 CMFL03. The recipient could log into CTSS later, from any terminal, and look for the file, and print it out if it was there.
"A proposed CTSS MAIL command was described in an undated Programming Staff Note 39, "Minimum System Documentation" by Pat Crisman, Glenda Schroeder, and Louis Pouzin. Numerical sequence places the note in either Dec 64 or Jan 65. PSN 39 proposed a plan for documenting the CTSS system as many of its developers transitioned to the Multics development project. Among other topics, PSN 39 suggested creation of a facility that would allow any CTSS user to send a message to any other. The proposed uses were communication from "the system" to users informing them that files had been backed up, communication to the authors of commands with criticisms, and communication from command authors to the CTSS manual editor.
"My colleague Noel Morris and I were new members of the MIT sponsored research staff in spring 1965, working for the Political Science department. When we read the PSN document about the proposed CTSS MAIL command, we asked "where is it?" and were told there was nobody available to write it. Noel and I wrote a version of MAIL for CTSS in the summer of 1965. Noel saw how to use the features of the new CTSS file system to send the messages, and I wrote the actual code that interfaced with the user. (We made a few changes from the proposal during the course of implementation: e.g. to read one's mail, users just used the PRINT command instead of a special argument to MAIL.)
"The CTSS manual writeup and the source code of MAIL are available online.
"The idea of sending "letters" using CTSS was initially resisted by management, as a waste of resources. However, CTSS Operations did need a facility to inform users when a request to retrieve a file from tape had been completed, and we proposed MAIL as a solution for this need. (Users who had lost a file due to system or user error, or had it deleted for inactivity, had to submit a request form to Operations, who ran the RETRIEVE program to reload them from tape.) Since the blue 7094 installation in Building 26 had no CTSS terminal available for the operators, one proposal for sending such messages was to invoke a program from the 7094 console switches, inputting a code followed by the problem number and programmer number in BCD. I argued that this was much too complex and error prone, and that a facility that let any user send arbitrary messages to any other would have more general uses, which we would discover after it was implemented. I think MAIL was added as a CTSS command in August 1965.
"MAIL was a privileged command, that could do things normal user programs could not: it used the call (shown in MAD)
ATTACH.(PROB, PROG)
"to switch to the recipient's file directory, and then added the message to the user's mailbox file on disk. CTSS supported file locking so that readers and writers did not interfere with each other. Users could not read each others' mailboxes, and MAIL was soon used for personal communication as well as work related messages.
"The CTSS MAIL command took the file name to be sent and then pairs of arguments, the problem and programmer numbers of the recipients:
MAIL F1 F2 M1416 2962
"would send a mail message containing the contents of file F1 F2 to my mailbox. You had to know the problem and programmer numbers for the recipients. You could also send mail to a list of recipients stored in a disk file:
MAIL F1 F2 (LIST) ADDR FILE
"You could send mail to everybody on your project by typing
MAIL F1 F2 M1416 *
"You couldn't send mail to * * (that is, all users on all projects) unless your programmer number or problem number was canned into the MAIL program. Dick Mills's (assistant director, Project MAC), Bill Bierstadt's (system administrator, MIT Comp Center), and my programmer numbers were baked into the code. We, and any user on the problem number M1416, used for CTSS system programming, could send messages to all users. Because MAIL was privileged, users could trust that messages were sent by the person named in the header, unless their password had been compromised.
"The MAIL command created or inserted messages into a file called MAIL BOX in the recipient's home directory. Privileged users could send URGENT MAIL instead, and could send mail even if the user's disk quota was exhausted. The LOGIN command was modified to print
YOU HAVE MAIL BOX
or
YOU HAVE URGENT MAIL
at login if these files existed and had nonzero length.
"Since it uses the ATTACH. call, I believe MAIL could not have been implemented until after the CTSS New File System, which was put up for users on 8/9/65.
"The listings for the source of CTSS are online in Paul Pierce's Collection. The MAD language source of MAIL is the first file in file COM5 on tape S1. Authors are not listed, but the code is recognizably mine, by comments, style, and indentation.
"Errol Morris (Noel's brother) blogged about the creation of CTSS MAIL in his New York Times blog in June 2011, after some very pleasant telephone conversations with me and a lot of thorough research and fact checking. Errol was also interviewed on NPR about his article on June 20, 2011.
The First Spam?
"Brad Templeton wrote a nice article on the history of spam on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the DEC salesman ARPANet spam.
"There was an earlier mass electronic mail message sent to a large community of unwilling readers [my definition of spam] that predates the 1978 DEC spam. This message was sent using CTSS MAIL about 1971, at a time of campus unrest and anti-war rallies.
"By the start of the 70s, there were over a thousand users of MIT's CTSS system, using the system by dial-up from the MIT campus and from other, mostly academic, locations. They used MAIL to coordinate, share information on all kinds of topics, etc, just as now. In those days I led the system programming group for some of MIT's computing services including CTSS, and I was mighty displeased one day, probably about 1971, to discover that one of my team had abused his privilege to send a long anti-war message to every user of CTSS that began
THERE IS NO WAY TO PEACE. PEACE IS THE WAY.
"I pointed out to him that this was inappropriate and possibly unwelcome, and he said, "but this is important!"
"Noel Morris and I had foreseen the possibility of inappropriate mass mailing in the original MAIL command, and put in code to prevent it. Then, as now, anti-spam measures were not always effective, and then, as now, the spammer thought that his behavior shouldn't be subject to the rules.
"(This story was in Wired Magazine in April 1998. The author got my name wrong and thought that the story had something to do with mailing lists. The programmer who sent the message, and Noel, are both gone.)
"Now we all have to filter spam. I wrote up how I deal with over fifteen thousand spam messages a day.
US Post Office
"There was a lot of nervousness in the mid 60s about ticking off the US Post Office. Calling our facility MAIL was thought by some to be a Bad Idea, because they feared the Post Office would require the destruction of a first class stamp for each message sent. If you put a personal note in a parcel, the rule then was that you were supposed to cancel and attach first class postage, because the US Post Office had a monopoly on mail transmission...."
(((more.)))
