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BOB METCALFE: "From the Ether" InfoWorld.com December 14, 1999
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OPEN-SOURCE SENDMAIL WELCOMES ITS COMMERCIAL COUSIN, SENDMAIL INC.
LET'S START this week with some "open source" operating systems
history. This will bring us from last week's letter of the week,
lambda, to this week's, atsign (_at_). Then let's check on how
open-source sendmail software, which uses atsign, is being
leveraged by modern capitalists at Sendmail Inc.
Now look, we had open-source computer operating systems in the
1970s. They included MIT's Multics, MIT's Incompatible
Timesharing System (ITS), Bolt Beranek and Newman's Tenex, and
AT&T's Unix.
For example, we ran Tenex at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
on our two clones of Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10
minicomputers.
But when minicomputers took off in the 1980s, it wasn't Multics,
ITS, Tenex, or Unix that won out by freely proliferating their
sources. Modern capitalists at Digital won in minicomputers by
selling binaries of their proprietary VMS operating system,
developed by the same David Cutler soon to deliver binaries of
Windows 2000 from Microsoft.
If you're an old programmer, you probably used atsign (_at_) back
then to indicate indirect addressing in assembly languages. You
wrote _at_1234 to tell your computer not to use 1234 as an operand
address, but rather to use the address found in location 1234. I
wrote a lot of PDP-10 atsigns in my day, and so did one Ray
Tomlinson, who was working with Tenex in 1970 on early versions
of Internet host software.
Tomlinson wrote the Tenex software that composed, delivered, and
read the first Internet e-mail. He doesn't remember what the
first e-mail said, but we all remember what ASCII character
Tomlinson chose to separate his e-mail address from the name of
the server where his mailbox was kept. He chose atsign (_at_).
Ray_at_BBN meant Ray at BBN.
Over the next decade, name and mail protocols changed, but
atsign persisted. And one Eric Allman led the development of
sendmail, to this day the Internet's primary (75 percent) mail
server software.
[...]
MORE METCALFE
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Received on Tue Dec 14 1999 - 13:36:51 GMT