[TUHS] attachments: MIME and uuencode

[clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

Maybe - I'm not sure how much of my Tek old stuff is recoverable.  I did
just find something for Noel recently.  Who knows ;-)
There is one tape I have from that time that a) I'm not sure what is on it
and b) if its readable.  It's on my to do list.   I will add it to the pile,

Clem

On Sun, Mar 12, 2017 at 7:35 PM, Mary Ann Horton <mah at mhorton.net> wrote:

> 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 <mah at mhorton.net> 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
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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