The MsgGroup was among the first network mailing lists. There were other mailing lists, most of them unsanctioned, around the educational sites. The first widely popular unofficial list, called SF-Lovers, was devoted to science-fiction fans.
BREAK The header wars brought out the stubborn and strong-willed traits of the programmers. Operating conflicts between machines were only the half of it. Header troubles were also rooted in human disagreement over how much and what kind of information should be presented at the tops of the messages. People differed widely over how much header information they cared to deal with when looking at their mail.
Some programmers and mail programs included a lot more in their header fields than others did. They iced the cake with character counts, key words and various esoterica. Critics meanwhile argued strenuously for economy, opposing an information overload. Short messages with cumbersome headers always appeared top-heavy, out of balance, emphasizing the header rather than the message. Brian Reid at Carnegie-Mellon, who often sounded the voice of reason in the MsgGroup, was in the short-header camp. One day he received a sarcastic message from a colleague and posted it to the MsgGroup:
Date: 7Apr 1977 1712 EST From: Bob Chansler at CMU-10A Reply-To: Cheese Coop at CMU-10A Subject: Re: Close, but no cigar To: BRIAN.REID at CMU-10A CC: Chansler@ CMU-10A Sender: BOB.CHANSLER at CMU-10A Message ID: [ CMU-10A] 7 Apr 1977 17:12:49 Bob Chansler In-Reply- To: Your message of April 6, 1977 My-Seq-#: 39492094 Yr-Seq-#: 4992488 Class: A Subclass: MCMXLVII Author: RC12 Typist: Fred Terminal: TTY 88 FE-L#: 44 Reason: Did Godzilla need a reason? Valid: Not before 12 Apr 1977 1321Z Suspend: After 19 Apr 1977 0000Z Spelling-errors-this-message: 0 Spelling-errors-to-date: 23 Weather: Light rain, fog Forecast: Clearing by morning Psych-evaluation-of-sender: Slightly unstable
Security-level: Public Security-sublevel: 0 Authority-to-send: General Authority-to-rcv: General #-people-in-terminal-room: 12
XGP: UP-cutter not working
No comments:
Post a Comment