MAIL-11, was Re: [HECnet] PDP-11/70 on FPGA

[Paul Koning]

On Aug 11, 2010, at 5:34 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

Paul Koning wrote:
...
MAIL-11
MAIL-11 was written in Basic-Plus (or BP2) so it would work on non-FPP machines.   That assumes you're not counting the earlier one that was used only internally, written in TECO and distributed by some field office clown who was fired for it...

Yes. Inferred by the above.
*Sigh*
Sorry for the misinformation. My brain is playing tricks on me.

I didn't know there was ever one written in TECO. Yikes... :-)

MAIL-11 started out as an internal tool written by Mark Goodrich.   I'm pretty sure it was in TECO.   It certainly was slow.   But it worked; it gave us email connectivity to the rest of the engineering net, via DECnet.

At some point someone not connected to RSTS decided this should go out to the field, so he grabbed that code and just started distributing it, without even asking let along receiving permission.   We put a stop to that quickly.   But possibly as a result of that, a new mail program was created (again by Mark), written from scratch in Basic with good performance, which was suitable for outside use and indeed became a product.

	paul