hi, Robert,
Back then there were actually very few genuine e-mail addr (or anything
else e-mail related) parsers - e-mail was simply text shown almost verbatim
to the user (with sometimes the ability to hide some of the header fields).
i wrote my b[atch]smtp parser, and it dealt with addresses by parsing
both styles simultaneously until one failed, then switched to the other
(it was kind of fun doing that) at Berkeley in early 80s. Eric Allman
had already written sendmail, i think, which presumably parsed. i don't
remember when/if ever the user programs on Unix started parsing more
than "a string".
cheers, Greg