But how to get this invention running out on the network? The answer lay in the file-transfer protocol -- spelling out the programming rules by which data files would be sent back and forth between machines.
In July 1972, one evening at MIT's Tech Square, as a programmer named Abhay Bhushan was writing the final specifications for the ARPANET file-transfer protocol, someone suggested piggybacking Tomlinson's e-mail programs onto the end product. Why not? If electronic messages could ride on CPYNET, they might just as well ride on the file-transfer protocol. Bhushan and others worked out some modifications. Next, they sought approval from their peers.
It was an unwritten rule that network programmers regularly shared new work with the rest of their community in the interest of improving it. That practice had been started in 1969 by Dave Crocker's brother Steve, then a UCLA graduate student. To avoid sounding too declarative, he had sent a technical note regarding host-computer software to his colleagues under the heading "Request for Comments" -- it became known as RFC 1 -- and in the decades since, thousands of RFC s, written by anyone with a technical contribution to make to the network, have accumulated. Jon Postel, another UCLA graduate student, became the keeper of the RFC s (a role he has retained to this day). When, in August 1972, Postel received an RFC from Bhushan and his team spelling out the manner in which e-mail could ride piggyback on the file-transfer protocol, Postel thought to himself, "Now there's a nice hack." The ARPANET's first electronic mail-handling twins, named MAIL and MLFL, came to life.
Tomlinson became well-known for SNDMSG and CPYNET. But he became better known for a brilliant (he called it obvious) decision he made while writing those programs. He needed a way to separate, in the e-mail address, the name of the user from the machine the user was on. How should that be denoted? He wanted a character that would not, under any conceivable circumstances, be found in the user's name. He looked down at the keyboard he was using, a Model 33 Teletype, which almost everyone else on the Net used, too. In addition to the letters and numerals there were about a dozen punctuation marks. "I got there first, so I got to choose any punctuation I wanted," Tomlinson said. "I chose the @ sign." The character also had the advantage of meaning "at" the designated institution. He had no idea he was creating an icon for the wired world.
Stephen Lukasik, a physicist who directed ARPA from 1971 to 1975, was among the first users and great advocates of network mail. Lukasik had begun his career in the 1950s working for BBN and MIT while he was a graduate student. He joined ARPA in 1966 to work on nuclear test detection, and he had watched the creation of the ARPANET. During his rise to the directorship, he had fought especially hard to protect the computer science community's funding. ARPA was under pressure to do defense-related work with direct applications. Lukasik saw computing as a more fundamental but important technology and defended it as such before Congress. His favorite part of ARPA was Larry Roberts's Information Processing Techniques Office.
But sometimes things went a bit too far. As director, he walked around a lot, dropping in on people in their offices. One day he was in Information Processing Techniques when he noticed a folder lying on top of a file cabinet. Its orange cover ("not my favorite color") caught his eye. The folder was labeled "Computer-Assisted Choreography." It contained progress reports on a project that used dancers' movements to map human motions by computer. "I went ballistic," he said. He could picture the headline: PENTAGON FUNDS DANCE RESEARCH.
Lukasik told his staff to tell the scientists, if "you're going to do something that looks like it's 40,000 miles away from defense, please leave our name off of it." He understood the research and didn't care if they did it, but he didn't want them bragging about it. Steve Crocker, by now a program manager working under Roberts, was glad he wasn't the one overseeing the dance automation project. But he did have a small problem of his own with researchers he was funding at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "On random unannounced visits, they would show me proudly the lab's quadraphonic simulation of a buzzing fly -- which ate up 25 percent of the computing resources there," Crocker said.
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