Obituary, for Ray Tomlinson and Email

In the ANSI standardization process in the 1960s there was a long debate over which characters to use. Other options included the ±, √, and ° symbols, and typewriter keyboards at the time also included ¢, ½, and ¼. For some reason, "@" was deemed more important than those alternatives, which makes it hard to say it's 10°C outside using 7-bit ASCII.

I can't come up with any mechanism whereby "@" would have needed saving. It's not like "|" has much popularity, but it still hangs on. Who "saved" "|"? For that matter, did Twitter save '#'?

But that's not my primary comment. This piece, like many other recent articles on the topic, omit a key part of email - UUCP-based email. The obituary assumes "your mail server will consult the DNS", but DNS didn't exist until the early 1980s - years after UUCP was developed to send email between computers that weren't connected full-time to a network or each other.

Instead, many would schedule late-night telephone calls, when the long-distance rates were cheaper, and transfer messages in batches.

You would have to route messages manually. A UUCP email address might be "mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko", where mcvax was well-enough known that others knew how to send email there, and it would eventually get forwarded to the chernenko mailbox on kremvax. In this context, "kremvax" wasn't globally unique, but only "the kremvax known to moskvax" and "the moskvax known to mcvax", etc.

Nowadays this might be "chernenko@kremvax.su", but that requires a centralized globally unique resolvable MX record.

I think it's important to mention this because the obituary article compared federated to non-federated systems. The bang path mechanism shows that it's possible to be even more federated than SMTP over DNS MX records. As a consequence, it can potentially deliver email through USB memory sticks to remote sites or behind network firewalls ... or the Iron Curtain. :)