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Comment by tfinniga | Hacker News Reader

You might not remember this, but that's exactly what originally happened.

You had CompuServe mail, and Prodigy mail, and AOL mail, and any number of internal mail systems at different companies. There was not a single mail format or agreed upon address space. Getting mail from one system to another was a huge pain.

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That's not how it "originally happened." Perhaps you're too young to remember the days before AOL and CompuServe, but email was being used more than a decade before those services. When those services started bringing messagint to consumers, yes, they had some proprietary set-ups but that was not how it "originally happened" -- that was a short-term glitch in the much longer and more open history of email.

I am old enough to remember. Actually, because my mother worked at a university in engineering while I was in another city going to university, I could email her. It was crazy!!! My bestie and I then tried to figure out how it worked, and spammed the entire college with a "Happy Holidays Laidies" email. (It was a simpler time).

That said, no one else was using it back then unless you worked military or university. Once it started to commercialize, then you had all the walled gardens. So although you're technically correct, BBS's were still the majority of the way we were connecting back then.

There's a reason that sendmail exists, and that the sendmail book was so gigantic. Because it was terrible software, yes, but also because it was routing mail across a variety of different systems with different addressing rules and what have you.

RFC 822 didn't just come into existence one day.

Interesting. In fact, I do not remember that. I started using the internet some time in the 90s. I never used Compuserve nor AOL. I never heard about Prodigy.

I guess technically those were separate online services. They only connected up to the internet near the end of their lifetime.

You had to dial into AOL and Compuserve?

Yep. They had long lists of phone numbers you could dial into; when you set up the software, it would set itself up to use one near you, so you wouldn't get charged long-distance fees.

Email has been around for a long, long time. Besides the major players, there were any number of mail and public post networks that ran on hobbyist bulletin board systems (FIDONet and WWIVNet are two that come to mind on the BBS end, and BITNET was a popular academic network before TCP/IP took over the world).

Toward the end, there were gateways between (almost) all of these systems that worked more or less reliably. You had to keep a text file handy to figure out how to mung an address on network #1 so that it would delivered to network #2.

For instance, a WWIVNet user could send email to foo@bar.com by sending it to foo#bar.com@5XX, where 5xx was a WWIVNet node number in the 500 range (these were reserved for gatewaying purposes). An Internet user could send email to 23@9073 on WWIVNet by sending it to 23-9073@(some site that was running the gateway software).

Similar address rewriting hacks were used for the other networks. Some were pretty straightforward -- I remember CompuServe used addresses roughly like 888,923423. To send mail from the Internet to CompuServe, you just had to change the comma to a period and tack @compuserve.com on the end. Others were pretty arcane.

Probably more than you wanted to know. :-)

Millions and millions of people did.

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