[LINK] RFC: Email in Australia

[Roger Clarke]

At 8:40 +1000 12/9/08, <someone> asked:
>Would you be so kind as to let me know when sending emails in 
>Australia first came into being

Is anyone aware of an authoritative reference on this?

Can anyone improve on (or correct) my quick summary below?

Thanks.

I may need to upgrade my 'history of the Internet in Oz' to cover 
this more fully.  And now gopher, WAIS and I guess even the Web are 
history;  so they need to be documented too.  Tony Barry, write that 
chapter please!

__________________________________________________________________________


This is a quick throw-together.  It draws on some previous research 
and publications, but it is not carefully considered.  Others will be 
able to at least improve on it, and maybe even correct it in some 
places.

The question can be answered in several ways.

In the 1960s, there were predecessors to what we currently think of 
as email.  These early incarnations were 'home-grown', and restricted 
to people with accounts on a single multi-user computer.

The conventional interpretation of 'email' is that which is specified 
in IETF RFCs 2821 and 2822 (which replaced 821 and 822 of August 
1982).  The way IETF specifications work is that they document (and 
tidy up) pre-existing services.  So 1982 is not the date of 
invention, but of formal specification.

Email as conventionally defined was invented in 1972, and used on the 
original ARPAnet, the predecessor of the Internet.

By the mid-1970s, Australian computer science academics, and perhaps 
some computer science researchers outside academe, were sporadic 
users of ARPAnet, and almost certainly of ARPAnet email.  So one 
tenable answer to the question 'when did the sending of emails in 
Australia come into being?' is 'about 1975'.

The Australian Computer Science Network (ACSnet) was established in 
the mid-1970s, and email was an important use of it.  Almost all 
Australian computer scientists in universities and CAEs (and some 
employed in industry) had ftp and email access via ACSnet by the late 
1970s.  That makes two reasons why a tenable answer to the question 
is 'about 1975'.  (Yes, I've bcc'd Bob Kummerfeld, who should be able 
to sort out at least this bit and probably more).

In 1992, I published the results of a survey of Commonwealth 
government agencies, which included some questions on the 
establishment date of their *intra*-organisational email systems. 
The organisation that was then the Government Business Enterprise 
called Telecom (now the privatised Telstra) was first, installing 
theirs in 1980, 3 more organisations in 1982 and 6 in 1984, after 
which it became reasonably common in large organisations.

(8 of 12 parts of Defence replied to that survey, but not DSTO - 
which may have been an earlier mover.  A very few very large business 
enterprises may have installed email internally in the 1980-84 
timeframe.  Possibly, so might a small number of computer and 
telecommunications industry companies).

Note that *inter*-organisational email only became mainstream in the 
mid-to-late 1980s, and was uncommon (and very slow) until the open, 
public Internet became available c. 1993.


References

Clarke R.A., Campbell P.J. & Telfer S.G. (1992)  'EDI:  the Practices 
and Intentions of Agencies of the Commonwealth Government' 
Department of Commerce, ANU, September 1992, 141 pp. (relevant data 
on p. 28), ISBN 0 7315 1472 6

Clarke R. (2004)  'Origins and Nature of the Internet in Australia' 
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, January 2004 (previous versions of 1998 
and 2001), at http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/OzI04.html

IETF (2001)  ' Simple Mail Transfer Protocol'  RFC 2821, Internet 
Engineering Task Force, April 2001, at 
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

IETF (2001)  'Internet Message Format'  RFC 2822, Internet 
Engineering Task Force, April 2001, at 
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt

ISOC (2008) ' Histories of the Internet'  The Internet Society, at 
http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/index.shtml

Peter I. (2004)  'The history of email'  at 
http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/email.html


-- 
Roger Clarke                  http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/
			            
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
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Visiting Professor in Info Science & Eng  Australian National University
Visiting Professor in the eCommerce Program      University of Hong Kong
Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW