In 1973, Lukasik commissioned an ARPA study that found that three-quarters of all traffic on the ARPANET was e-mail. By then, sending e-mail was a simple and nearly trouble-free process. However, reading or responding to it was far from easy. Text just poured onto the screen or out of the printer, and nothing separated the messages. To get to the last one, you had to run through them all again. For many users, the only way to read mail was to turn on the Teletype and print out streams of text. Composing messages was truly an annoyance, because tools for text editing were primitive. And there was no "reply" function for e-mail; to respond, you had to start a new message from scratch.
Lukasik, who hated throwing anything away, was beginning to get frustrated by the volume of e-mail piling up in his in-box. He went to Roberts. "I said, `Larry, this e-mail is great, but it's a mess!' " Lukasik recalled. "In typical Larry fashion, he came in the next day, and said, `Steve, I wrote some code for you that may help.' And he showed me how to get a menu of messages, or file them, or delete them." Roberts had just written the first mail manager software.
Roberts called his program RD, for "read." Everyone on the ARPANET loved it, and almost everyone came up with variations to RD -- a tweak here and a pinch there. A cascade of new mail-handling programs based on the Tenex operating system flowed into the network: NRD, WRD, BANANARD ("banana" was programmer slang for "cool" or "hip"), HG, MAILSYS, XMAIL . . . and they kept coming. Pretty soon, the network's main operators were beginning to sweat. They were like jugglers who had thrown too much up in the air. They needed more uniformity in these programs. Wasn't anyone paying attention to the standards?
BREAK Something about a mail system, digital or otherwise, is inviting to those with a certain nonconformist temperament. Perhaps because there must be rules, some people will always try bending them. There was the clever fellow, for instance, who got away with using the U.S. Postal Service to mail bricks, one by one, to Alaska, until he had enough there to build himself a house; it was the cheapest way to ship them from the lower 48 states. Or there's Auntie Em, who embellishes her packages to her far-flung nieces and nephews with fanciful illustrations, to the probable amusement rather than consternation of the postal clerks. Somewhere in a thick book of fine print are the official postal regulations regarding U.S. mail -- what can be sent, what can't, and how. But within limits, all manner of packages get delivered, because human mail clerks can adjust to a fairly wide latitude of nonconformity.
But imagine a local post office somewhere that decided to go it alone, making up its own rules for addressing, packaging, stamping and sorting mail. Imagine if that rogue post office decided to invent its own set of Zip codes. Imagine any number of post offices taking it upon themselves to invent new rules. Imagine widespread confusion. Mail handling begs for a certain amount of conformity, and because computers are less fault-tolerant than human beings, e-mail begs loudly.
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