From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: mah@mhorton.net (Mary Ann Horton) Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2017 16:35:24 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] attachments: MIME and uuencode In-Reply-To: References: <71748884-ac1a-d565-aa08-80f9220594ac@mhorton.net> Message-ID: <34f2acb2-d104-ffde-c36e-4cc14905fe21@mhorton.net> That's interesting, Clem. It would be useful to date the real date of the first email attachment sent. Right now the only firm date we have is 6/1/80. Do you have any old email or copy of uuencode that could establish an earlier date? Thanks, Mary Ann On 03/12/2017 10:42 AM, Clem Cole wrote: > I think it might actually predates 6/1/80 by 6-9 months because I was > at Tek a year earlier and you and I started corresponding that first > summer I was at Tek. I remember that you had sent me a copy of it > shortly after you wrote it. So I think there is a chance that that > might be a slightly later version. > > Clem > > On Sat, Mar 11, 2017 at 2:07 PM, Mary Ann Horton > wrote: > > I just heard from a historian named Piotr Klaban with an > interesting historical sidelight. > > Apparently today 3/11/17 is being publicized as the 25th > anniversary of the email attachment, citing Nat Borenstein's > MIME. Piotr points out that uuencode predates MIME, and he's right. > > I checked and, while I don't have any email archives from that > time frame at Berkeley, I was able to find the 4BSD archive on > minnie that dates the uuencode.1c man page at 6/1/80. We didn't > call them attachments back then, just sending binary files by > email. (Prior to then it was common to just include the text of > the file raw in the email, which only worked for ASCII files.) It > was a few years later when cc:Mail and Microsoft Mail started > calling uuencoded files embedded in email "attachments". > > When MIME came out in 1992 I became a champion of SMTP/MIME as a > standard - it was a big improvement. But uuencod predated MIME by > 12 years. > > Mary Ann > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: