[ih] propagation of early email?

[jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>

    > Unix was developing pretty much in parallel with the ARPANET.

I wasn't sure that was absolutely accurate (my memory was that Unix was
somewhat later), but having reviewed some things, I think you're basically
correct.

According to "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", by Dennis M.
Ritchie, the earliest thinking was in the 1969 timeframe, with the first code
(for the PDP-7) written around the end of that year. The first PDP-11/20
(without memory protection/relocation) version was up at the end of 1970; the
PDP-11/45 (with MP/R) arrived somewhat later, but I was unable to discover a
definite date. (PDP-11/20 versions were still being installed in 1973, per
"Quarter Century of Unix", Salus, pg. 47.) Pipes didn't appear until 1972,
and the kernel was only re-written in C in 1973. The first non-Bell Unix site
appears to have been sometime around December, 1973, after the first Unix
presentation (at SOSP, in October, 1973).

Meanwhile, the ARPANET sent its first packet (the infamous UCLA login
attempt) in October, 1969, and a review of the list of early RFC's shows that
the Host-Host protocol, although first proposed at the end of 1969, didn't
fully settle down until early 1971. As to the applications, the first draft
RFC for TELNET was in February, 1971, with FTP shortly thereafter, in April.

So I think the ARPANET was a tiny bit in advance of Unix, maybe a year or so,
but not very much.

	Noel