Re: [ietf-smtp] Stray <LF> in the middle of messages

[Valdis Kl ē tnieks <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, 08 Jun 2020 10:03:49 -0400, Hector Santos said:

> The Internet Mail format officially starting with RFC 822 selected the 
> DOS/Windows format <CR><LF> format.
>
> Why?
>
> Maybe because at that point in time, Microsoft had owned 90% of the 
> growing Personal Computer (PC) market.  The Mac was still considered 
> (legally) a luxury commodity (otherwise their anti-trust status would 
> no longer apply), and *nix was still mostly at the IT networking level.

Unlikely.  When RFC822 came out in 1982, the IBM PC was a whole whopping 12
months old, even TCP/IP was equally young, the concept of a consumer ISP was
still a decade away, and most of the Arpanet/Milnet and CSNet were various
Unixoid systems, except for some oddball IBM mainframes and all the 36-bit
boxes running TOPS-10 and -20 and Multics, and you couldn't easily hook a
Windows box to an Ethernet because the Clarkson Packet drivers were like 5
years away, KA9Q was still 3 years away, and even MIT's PC/IP was out for only
6 months.

Oh, and the Macintosh wasn't a "luxury item" - it was non-existent, as the first
Macintosh was famously announced in a killer ad during the 1984 Super Bowl.

(When Clarkson got on the Arpanet in summer 1984, the 30 or so Sun and Unix
boxes added an entire 1% to the size of the Internet, which was only around
3,000 directly connected machines at the time. And I had to hear in details
what Russ Nelson thought of Microsoft's OS because he was writing the packet
drivers in the cubicle next to mine. :)