1985

Early Email

One of the projects for NCR was to write a program so that the NCR email application could communicate to other email systems.  Email was a relatively new thing, available for the select few who were on the early the first ARPANET back in 1983, it had spread as APRANET morphed into the Internet as it spread to Universities and then to businesses.  On thing that differentiated the NCR Office System from the Harris “Word Processing System” is that NCH had and email program that could only send email to other users of NCR systems.  Of course it would be more useful if it could send email to persons on other systems but the problem was that there were many different email programs that didn’t talk to each other. In 1983 the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was introduced on the ARPANET which provided a “standard” for exchanging emails between different systems which help facilitate email exchange.

Bulletin Board systems (BBS) were becoming more widespread and larger with one of the largest being CompuServe which had grown from a thousand users in 1980 to over a hundred thousand by ’84.  CompuServe provided local phone numbers in cities throughout the U.S. which people could dial to reach their servers in Columbus Ohio.  CompuServe initially a BBS grew to provide “information services” to users and businesses.  By 1985 one of those services was email which NCR wanted to tap into so NCR gave a contract to Elias who then gave to me the task of writing a program to send and receive  email between the NCR office system and CompuServe. 

It was a fun project, working on the NCR “PC” based system, writing code in the C programming language and working with early email.  What made even more fun was that I was provided with a CompuServe account paid for by NCR, which I made use of exploring the different CompuServe information services when I wasn’t working.   The work itself involved parsing CompuServe and NCR emails for the To, From, CC, Subject and body of each systems email and then transferring the information to the other’s email system.    

It was great working for Elias, nice bright clean offices a couple blocks from the beach.  Elias had expand some since when I was the first programmer he hired back in ‘76 and at this time had several other programmers who worked on projects mostly for Harris but there was Jimmy who also worked on NCR projects and often it would be just Jimmy and I in the office.  Elias, who still did some programming, spent most of his time at Harris so Jimmy and I would only occasionally see him at the office.    

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