A hacker's hacker, Vittal had written the MSG program in 1975 out of sheer love for the work. MSG was never formally funded or supported, "other than by me in my spare time," he explained. But soon, MSG had a user community of more than a thousand people, which in those days meant a huge portion of the wired world. Vittal had used Larry Roberts's RD mail program, which was great for handling two or three messages at a time, or even a short message stack, but Vittal was getting 20 messages a day now and wanted a program to manage them with greater ease. "What MSG did was close the loop," he said, "so that you could parcel messages out to various other files, called folders, and ultimately answer and forward."
Vittal, in fact, became widely known for putting the word "answer" into the lexicon of e-mail. He invented the ANSWER command, which made replying to messages a cinch. Recalled Vittal, "I was thinking, `Hey, with an answer command I don't have to retype -- or mistype! -- a return address or addresses.' "
An inspiring model, MSG spawned a whole new generation of mail systems, including MH, MM, MS and a heavily funded, Pentagon-sponsored project at BBN called HERMES. MSG was the original "killer app" -- a software application that took the world by storm. Although there was never anything official about it, MSG clearly had the broadest grass-roots support. It was all over the network; even ARPA's top folks in the Pentagon used it. If anything was the most widely accepted standard, it was MSG, which reigned for a long while. (A few people at BBN were still using MSG in the 1990s.)
Vittal's MSG and his ANSWER command made him a legendary figure in e-mail circles. "It was because of Vittal that we all assimilated network mail into our spinal cords," recalled Brian Reid. "When I met him years later, I remember being disappointed -- as one often is when one meets a living legend -- to see that he had two arms and two legs and no rocket pack on his back."
More than just a great hack, MSG was the best proof to date that on the ARPANET rules might get made, but they certainly didn't prevail. Proclamations of officialness didn't further the Net nearly as well as did throwing technology out onto the Net to see what worked. And when something worked, it was adopted.
BREAK The more that people used the ARPANET for e-mail, the more relaxed they became about what they said. There were anti-war messages, and, during the height of the Watergate crisis, a student on the ARPANET advocated President Nixon's impeachment.
Not only was the network expanding, it was opening wider to new uses and creating new connections among people. One of the most stunning examples of this began with the lead programmer of BBN's crack engineering team -- Will Crowther.
A small circle of friends at BBN had gotten hooked on Dungeons and Dragons, an elaborate fantasy role-playing game in which one player invents a setting and populates it with monsters and puzzles, and the other players then make their way through that setting. The entire game exists only on paper and in the minds of the players.
Dave Walden, who had been a programming ace working under Crowther at BBN, got his introduction to the game one night in 1975, when Eric Roberts, a student from a class he was teaching at Harvard, took him to a D&D session. Walden immediately rounded up a group of friends for continued sessions. Roberts created the Mirkwood Tales, an elaborate version of Dungeons and Dragons set in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. The game stretched on for the better part of a year and was played mostly on Walden's living room floor. One of the regulars was Will Crowther. Where the dozen other players chose names like Zandar, Klarf or Groan for their characters, Crowther was simply Willie, a stealthy thief.
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