John Levine wrote:
Mailing lists like this one have been around for a rather long time,
quite possibly since before you were born, and they're not going to go
away.
I don't remember the precise details, but thought it worth using the above as
an excuse to review that ancient history:
The earliest Arpanet mailing lists were hand-managed. The DEC PDP-10 Tenex
SNDMSG program could take a list of addressees, but there was no queuing, so
the sender had to sit and watch for issues with the remote FTP/mail server in
real time.
I think that the first mailing list was either MsgGroup or Header-People.
Circa 1973. Might have been 74. Don't believe it was as late as 75.
Yes, both were about email, with the former being concepts, usage, and the
like, while the latter was techncal. I think MsgGroup was the first. It is
discussed in Katie Hafner's "Where Wizards Stay Up Late". Anyone seriously
interested in email and online group collaboration issues would benefit from
seeing what sorts of things were raised back then.
RFC availability announcements were the other mailing list that I recall from
the very early days. I think Postel said it took the better part of a day to
ship an announcement to an entire list of 100, or so, recipients.
(For reference, the 1972 gasoline crisis prompted creation of the first online
group "teleconferencing" system, which ran as a centralized, dial-in facility.
It was deemed a huge success, and essential to the proper management of the
crisis process.)
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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