The diversity of nonstandard systems on the Net caused problems even with something as apparently trivial as Tomlinson's @ sign. The @ sign dispute was long-running, and there were many sides to it. There was disagreement over what should go on the left hand side of the sign and what should go on the right. But before that, there was the debate over whether it should even be used at all as the delimiter between the user and host names in the address.
The Multics folks objected vehemently when it was first used, understandably so. Tomlinson, a Tenex hacker, had chosen the @ sign apparently without realizing that in the Multics system it was the character used to send a "line kill" command. Any Multics user who tried to send mail to "Tomlinson@bbn-tenex" would quickly get into trouble. Multics would start reading the address, encounter the @ sign, and throw away everything that had been typed previously on the line.
Ted Myer and Austin Henderson, from the BBN Tenex group, decided to try their hand at solving one of these compatibility issues, the header problem. In April 1975 they issued a new list of "standard" headers. The document, which they gave the title "Message Transmission Protocol," appeared as Request for Comment 680.
RFC 680 immediately created a ruckus among those who thought the effort too Tenex-oriented. Jon Postel, whose quiet word was often final, wielded the gavel. RFC 680, he said, was as standard as mail ever got. "It is nice that many mail-reading programs will accept mail that does not conform to the standard," he said, "but that does not justify mail-sending programs' violation of the standard." If the standard is inadequate, he added, any proposals to change it are welcome.
The tiff made clear that Tenex sites, led by BBN, formed a dominant culture on the network, while the "minority" sites, with their diverse operating systems, posed a potentially rebellious countermovement. Thus were planted the roots of a protracted conflict that continued into the 1980s and became known in the community as the header wars. Many of those battles were fought in the arena of a new group of computer conversationalists -- the "MsgGroup."
BREAK On June 7, 1975, Steve Walker, a program manager at ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office, drafted a message to announce the formation of an electronic discussion group. The network community, he wrote, needs "to develop a sense of what is mandatory, what is nice and what is not desirable in message services. We have had a lot of experience with lots of services and should be able to collect our thoughts on the matter." He welcomed opinions from anyone willing to toss them in and even provided a bit of ARPA funding to launch it. "This whole thing is a new attempt," he continued. "I hope from all this to develop a long-term strategy for where message services should go on the ARPANET and indeed in the DOD. Let's have at it."
In the truncated verbal style permeating the culture of computing, the Message Services Group was dubbed the MsgGroup.
Dave Farber, on the computer science faculty of the University of California at Irvine, volunteered to be the MsgGroup file clerk; and Farber volunteered the help of a colleague, a consultant named Einar Stefferud. Before long, the bulk of the daily housekeeping chores fell to Stefferud, who began in the job by keeping the list of MsgGroup participants, signing up newcomers, cajoling them into posting introductory biographies of themselves, and sorting out bounced mail. Stefferud would become the MsgGroup's moderator and man behind the curtain. Serving as the go-between, he received messages for posting and manually remailed them to everyone on the list. It was an arduous process that became automated later on.
Not everyone conducted his business in the open-air market of the MsgGroup; there was just as much or more private e-mail traffic among programmers. But everyone in the world involved in implementing mail systems eventually participated, or at least knew what transpired, in the group. The discussion was to last 10 years. In time, thousands of messages, and hundreds of thousands of words, were exchanged by the hundred or so MsgGroup participants.
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