It's probably escaped our notice because of the holidays, Mark Crispin
passed away on the 28th of December. I didn't know Mark too well, but
he was a very important visionary.
I first enjoyed his work as a user of the MM program on TOPS-20, upon
which he based the design of IMAP. MM featured strong searching and
marking capabilities, as well as all the customization a person could
want. It was through MM that people individualized there messages with
funny headers or a cute name. And it was all so easy to use. Mark was
constantly reminding us about that, and how UNIX's interface could
always stand improvement. Mark was an unabashed TOPS-20 fan.
Before the world had fully converged on vt100 semantics, Mark worked to
standardize SUPDUP and the SUPDUP option. He was also early to
recognize the limitations of a single host table.
Mark's sense of humor brought us RFC-748, the Telnet randomly-lose
option, which was the first April 1 RFC. He also wrote another such RFC
for UTF-9 and UTF-10.
Most of us benefit from Mark's work today through our use of IMAP, which
followed Einstein's advice by having a protocol that was as simple as
possible to tackle the necessary problems, but no simpler. We know this
because our first attempt was POP, which was too simple. Mark knew he
had hit the balance right because he made benefited from his experience
with lots of running code and direct work with many end users.
I will miss his quirkiness, his cowboy boots, and his recommendations
for the best Japanese food in a town where the IETF would visit, and I
will miss the contributions he should have had more time to make.
Eliot