Early Email
Please share your information about ID's and addresses that were used in conjunction with early email systems here.
Les Earnest
Text taken from this Original Post 24 Feb 2002
An even earlier ancestor of the ugly octal email addresses of the form
12345,67012@compuserve.com has been revealed. Responding to an earlier
comment, I said:
>More specifically, they were the login , numbers in
>the TOPS-10 timesharing systems that Compuserve used, which were derived
>from the PDP-6 timesharing system developed in 1965 primarily by Harris
>Hyman of DEC and evidently modelled after CTSS. Some old ideas hang on far
>past the time when they may have made sense.
Jerry Saltzer now sends me a note saying:
>That is a fascinating connection. I had always wondered about those
>compuserve e-mail addresses. It never occurred to me that they might be
>the direct descendents of the job cards that we slapped on the front of
>program decks for the Fortran Monitor System in 1959. (FMS is the thing
>that CTSS was Compatible with.)
In other words, those email identifiers directly descended from job control
cards in an IBM batch processing system of the late 1950s. Amazing!
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