Somewhat off-topic, as/and email (in which i am interested) related. Paul Eggert via tz wrote in <ab173302-45bc-4368-affd-c9d2f4341c98@cs.ucla.edu>: |On 2026-03-04 02:19, Philip Paeps wrote: |> What's wrong with "-07"? That's what's used in other parts of the |> world. Why is North America exceptional? | |Inertia. For example, the earliest email standard, Internet RFC 561 |(1973)[1], coauthored by the late Ray Tomlinson (widely credited for the |1971 invention of email![2]), was designed mostly for North America ... |[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc561 |[2]: |https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/technology/raymond-tomlinson-email-ob\ |ituary.html Apologising for trampling on an obituary, but regarding “When it burst onto the scene in 1971,” he added, “it gave the first tangible indication of how far the Internet might go in becoming the ubiquitous anyone-anywhere-to-anyone-anywhere communication system it has become.” i would point to "The Computer as a Communication Device" of Licklider and Tayler, from 1968 (a must-read, and iff only for the drawings; Americas finest, really (honestly)). Maybe even to note "As we may think" from Vannevar Bush, from 1945, though i treat it with suspicion (the elder were so deep we cannot even imagine it, and often so bible-"inspired"). Btw i (who spent a little time) came to { 196 A MAIL BOX PROTOCOL 224 Comments on Mailbox Protocol 354 THE FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL 385 COMMENTS ON THE FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL (RFC 354) 458 Mail Retrieval via FTP 475 FTP AND NETWORK MAIL SYSTEM 524 A Proposed Mail Protocol 542 File Transfer Protocol for the ARPA Network 555 Response to Critiques of the Proposed Mail Protocol 561 Standardizing Network Mail Headers 574 Announcement of a Mail Facility at UCSB 577 Mail Priority 640 Revised FTP Reply Codes 644 On the Problem of Signature Authentication for Network Mail 706 On the Junk Mail Problem 751 SURVEY OF FTP MAIL AND MLFL 772 MAIL TRANSFER PROTOCOL 773 COMMENTS ON NCP/TCP MAIL SERVICE TRANSITION STRATEGY rcf821.txt SIMPLE MAIL TRANSFER PROTOCOL (SMTP) john_postel-mail_protocol_via_ftp-1977.txt +722 788 SIMPLE MAIL TRANSFER PROTOCOL } HISTORY OF MAIL and put that in words as follows Electronic mail exchange in general is a concept even older. The earli‐ est well documented electronic mail system was part of the Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS) at MIT, its MAIL command had been proposed in a staff planning memo at the end of 1964 and was implemented in mid-1965 when Tom Van Vleck and Noel Morris wrote the necessary code. Similar communication programs were built for other timesharing systems. One of the most ambitious and influential was Murray Turoff’s EMISARI. Created in 1971 for the United States Office of Emergency Preparedness, EMISARI combined private electronic messages with a chat system, public postings, voting, and a user directory. During the 1960s it was common to connect a large number of terminals to a single, central computer. Connecting two computers together was rela‐ tively unusual. This began to change with the development of the ARPANET, the ancestor of today’s Internet. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson adapted the SNDMSG program, originally developed for the University of California at Berkeley timesharing system, to give it the ability to transmit a mes‐ sage across the network into the mailbox of a user on a different com‐ puter. For the first time it was necessary to specify the recipient’s computer as well as an account name. Tomlinson decided that the under‐ used commercial at ‘@’ would work to separate the two. Sending a message across the network was originally treated as a special instance of transmitting a file, and so MAIL and MLFL commands were in‐ troduced with RFC 385 as an extension to the file transfer protocol FTP of RFC 354, both in 1972. Until early 1973 many discussions and meetings around FTP occurred, and whereas RFC 475 paved a way towards standardiza‐ tion of mail via FTP, RFC 524 proposed a specialized mail protocol, an opinion that was officially picked up by the FTP RFC 542. Still, for many years, ARPANET mail was sent via FTP. Because it was not always clear when or where a message had come from, RFC 561 in 1973 aimed to formalize electronic mail headers, including “from”, “date”, and “subject”. In 1975 RFC 680 described fields to help with the transmission of messages to multiple users, including “to”, “cc”, and “bcc”. In 1977 these features and others went from best prac‐ tices to a binding standard in RFC 733. In September 1980, with RFC 772, the M(ail) T(ransfer) P(rotocol) was introduced, which had “strong similarities to portions of the File Transfer Protocol”. RFC 821 in Au‐ gust 1982 then introduced the refined S(imple) M(ail) T(ransfer) P(roto‐ col) in use, and usable, almost 42 years later, accompanied by RFC 822 that moved from “ARPA network text” to “internet text message”. Queen Elizabeth II of England became the first head of state to send electronic mail on March 26 1976 while ceremonially opening a building in the British Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)