[inforoots] early email

[Tom Van Vleck]

Interesting discussion of early electronic mail.

As soon as there were files on disk, people left notes for
each other in them; I remember doing this in 1964 on MIT's CTSS
to communicate with other users, by writing a file named
something like TO JOHN.

The idea of using the computer for mail was popular in the 1960s.
Several time-sharing systems had some kind of mail command.
Noel Morris and I wrote the MAIL command for CTSS, which had
a user community of hundreds of users, some distant from MIT,
in summer 1965.  There is a note describing my recollections at
     http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html
The note covers a lot of history of early computer mail and
related topics.

I have been working on a page with more details: it is not
publicly linked but you may be interested in
     http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-details.html
which has the CTSS manual excerpts for MAIL and messaging,
and the MAD language source of MAIL.  I am looking for a
copy of Programming Staff Note 49, by Pouzin, Schroeder,
and Crisman, which proposed a MAIL facility for the purpose
of allowing machine room operators to tell users their files
had been retrieved.  Noel and I generalized the idea to allow
any user to send any message to any other user.

I believe the SDC timesharing system had a MAIL command in
the mid 1960s  as well, and probably other timesharing systems
did too.