Embed Notice

In the early days of ARPANET email (back when we called it e-mail) there was no standard (yet) for how to deal with the '@' when displaying messages. Local sites might configure their MUAs (Message User Agents) to display as "Foo@Bar" (remember, no domains yet!) or as "Foo at Bar". On our ARPANET site #1 PDP-11/45 V6 UNIX at UCLA, very early on it was the latter, but I migrated it to the former (as we display it today) when I took over maintenance of the MUA/MTA (Message Transfer Agent) at the site.

There were also battles at the time regarding maximum message lengths to be permitted in email (that is, "e-mail"). Was 5K bytes enough? I called for much more. And at the time, mail was queued for up to half an hour before being sent (keep in mind the ARPANET backbone speed was effectively only 56 Kb/s. That's K, boys and girls!). I lobbied for much shorter delays, and eventually pushed it up to immediate delivery when possible.

I also argued with facilities to get better quality serial cables between the systems and the terminal rooms so I could bump the terminals up to 9600 bps or maybe even 19200. There was resistance to my request. I was told that I was being silly, because "nobody could even read at 1200 bps"). Uh, I eventually won that argument.