Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck? (Part Two)

2.

THE INVENTION OF E-MAIL

I asked Ben Berman, a Harvard student who works in my office and is a computer whiz, to get on the phone with me and Van Vleck. I was afraid that there were too many arcane details, and I wanted to understand more fully what Tom and my brother had been working on. If you could dig into the CTSS code itself, could you determine who wrote what, when?

BEN BERMAN : I’ve been looking over the complete Multics source code that is dated as late as 1973. This is the batch that’s brought up on the Web site. And I’m finding a lot of comments and how people would sign off in the code. How did you indicate that the piece of code was written by you and how did Noel? How did members of the team do that?

TOM VAN VLECK : Noel’s code might be indicated just by his initials and a date, or initials, date and a comment. Before e-mail was invented, everybody logged into the time-sharing system or submitted batch jobs by indicating two items of accounting data used by MIT. One was the problem number, and that was a number like T0234 or M1416 or something like that. Then programmers were assigned a programmer number, which increased in sequence. The lowest numbers were the first users of the machine. Noel’s programmer number was 3187 and mine was 2962. I still remember those, and a lot of other people’s, too. It was just something you just knew. Before e-mail, if we wanted to leave messages for each other, we would just put a file somewhere that the other person would notice and read. And then when we invented mail, you still had to say to whom you were sending the mail by giving a problem number and a programmer number. At the time, you had to know the mail address of the person you were sending it to, just like you do now. You had to know some arbitrary string of letters that would get the mail to them.

ERROL MORRIS : What were your arbitrary string of letters? And Noel’s arbitrary string of letters?

TOM VAN VLECK : Well, let’s see. Noel’s string of letters would have been a problem number and a programmer number, because that’s how we started. So, I would send mail to T0234, that would be the problem number. 3187 was Noel’s programmer number.

Friday, May 27, 1966 « A Day in the Life

Peter fixed (?) window upstairs

Up at 8 o’clock-fixed breakfast.  Wrote long letter to Dick Kendrick (started 8 days ago) but finally got it off along with birthday card.  Peter went to an appt. for a soap opera at 10 o’clock.  I went shopping-came home + fixed Bitke for this evening.  Made soup out of last night’s pot roast broth.  Paul + Jane joined us.  Peter got an $11 [crossed out writing] residual check.  He worked on fixing the window upstairs all afternoon.  Broke the new piece of glass + was furious.  Leon called + he has another appt on Tuesday.  He went + got a blow torch with 3 1/2 books of blue chips-Mary called around one o’clock.  Then again around 6-very obviously had been drinking + quite incoherent.  I finally got angry with her.  Margaret + Patsy hadn’t shown up in front of the school to be picked up-only poor little Abby who was there with her alone.  Jim came over about 7-Then Jane + Timmy.  Mary called twice during dinner-Peter spoke with her both times for a long time in the other room.  He hung up on her once + she hung up on him the second time.  Allen had come to get Abby thank God.  Mary had called the house (Mandeville) to say that Margaret + Patsy were no longer welcome at her apartment.  She can’t stand anyone at the moment including me very particularly + much more regrettably Dr. Thomsen-[crossed out writing] she’s been called Lou Robbins in New York.  The last call she told Peter she was leaving town but did say she’d be back at work on Tuesday-Told him if he wanted to stop her he’d have to come out there.  Peter had quite a bit to drink + was furious with her.  We played Risk + Timmy left at one-thirty-Jane at about 3:30 + finally Jim about 5:30.  We talked quite a bit + I picked up the incidental intelligence that [crossed out writing] Mary had a check for $1,000.00 which she’d managed to get hold of from the United California Bank.  From now on when Mary calls I’m going to talk to her-there’s too much trouble between us when Peter has to put up with all that crap.

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