[ih] Reporter query on the history of greater-than in quoted replies

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

    > From: Tony Finch 

    > So it seems this convention emerged on Usenet some time between 4.2BSD
    > (1983) and 4.3BSD (1986).

Inclusion in a news reader is probably what made it _popular_. But there may
have been an _individual_ who came up with it, and it got taken up into the
news reader(s) after people saw it and started copying it.

So probably the place to check now is to go into Usenet archives (assuming
they are still online, I lost track of their comings and goings) and look for
instances, trying to track the behaviour backwards in time...

      Noel