email History by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon 8

Ht/Wt-sender: 76/205

Machines: M&M s available but almond machine is empty M&M s-Last Nickel: 17

----------------------------------------- Brian, I do not understand your concern about the size of message headers. Bob.

Why can't we configure headers to print only the pieces of the header we choose to read? Reid asked. "Go ahead and put in 34 different header fields," he said. "All I ever really want to look at is `from' and `date.' "

Others agreed. The ideal program would allow users to design their own headers. At least one elaborate mail system offered an "invisible information" feature that allowed selective viewing of a great deal of header data.

On May 12, 1977, Ken Pogran at MIT, John Vittal at USC's Information Sciences Institute, Dave Crocker, now at the Rand Corp., and BBN's Austin Henderson launched a computer mail putsch. They announced "at last" the completion of a new mail standard, RFC 724, "A Proposed Official Standard for the Format of ARPA Network Messages." The standard they were proposing contained more than 20 pages of specifications -- syntactical, semantic and lexical formalities. The RFC explained that the receiver of a message could exercise an extraordinary amount of control over the message's appearance, depending on the capabilities of one's mail-reading system.

In the days after the publication of RFC 724, the computing community's response was at best cool to the new protocol. Jon Postel, who had been a defender of the old RFC 680, was the least impressed by the new proposal. He came down hard on the assertion that this was to be an official ARPA standard. "To my knowledge, no ARPANET protocol at any level has been stamped as official by ARPA," he said. "Who are the officials anyway? Why should this collection of computer research organizations take orders from anybody?" There was too much emphasis on officialism and not enough on cooperation and perfection of the system. "I prefer to view the situation as a kind of step-by-step evolution," he said, "where documents such as RFC s 561, 680 and 724 record the steps. To make a big point of officialness about one step may make it very hard to take the next step."

The RFC 724 team absorbed the criticism. Six months later, under Dave Crocker's and John Vittal's leadership, a final revised edition of RFC 724 was published as RFC 733. This specification was intended "strictly as a definition" of what was to be passed between ARPANET hosts. They didn't intend to dictate the look and feel of message programs or the features they could support. Less was required than allowed by the standard, they said, so here it was. And there it sat.

A number of software developers wrote or revised mail programs to conform with the new guidelines, but within a year of RFC 733's publication the persistent conflict picked up again. Of particular concern, RFC 733 headers were incompatible with a mail program called MSG (in spite of the fact that its author, John Vittal, had helped write RFC 733). MSG was far and away the most popular mail program on the ARPANET.