Where Wizards Stay Up Late (25 page)

The tiff made clear that Tenex sites, led by BBN, formed a dominant culture on the network, while the “minority” sites, with their diverse operating systems, posed a potentially rebellious countermovement. Thus were planted the roots of a protracted conflict that continued into the ensuing decade and became known in the community as the header wars. Many of those battles were fought in the arena of a new group of computer conversationalists—the “Msg-Group.”

On June 7, 1975, Steve Walker, an ARPA program manager at IPTO, drafted a message to announce the formation of something new—an electronic discussion group. The network community, he wrote, needs “to develop a sense of what is mandatory, what is nice, and what is not desirable in message services. We have had a lot of experience with lots of services and should be able to collect our thoughts on the matter. He welcomed opinions from anyone willing to toss them in and even provided a bit of ARPA funding to launch it. “This whole thing is a new attempt,” he continued. “I hope from all this to develop a long-term strategy for where message services should go on the
ARPANET
and indeed in the DOD. Let's have at it.”

In the truncated verbal style permeating the culture of computing, the Message Services Group was dubbed the MsgGroup.

Dave Farber at UC Irvine volunteered to be the MsgGroup file clerk; and Farber volunteered the help of a colleague, a consultant named Einar Stefferud. Before long, the bulk of the daily housekeeping chores fell to Stefferud, who began in the job by keeping the list of MsgGroup participants, signing up newcomers, cajoling them into posting introductory biographies of themselves, and sorting out bounced mail. Stefferud would become the MsgGroup's moderator and man behind the curtain. Serving as the go-between, he received messages for posting and manually remailed them to everyone on the list. It was an arduous process that became automated later on.

Not everyone conducted his business in the open-air market of the MsgGroup; there was just as much or more private e-mail traffic among programmers. But everyone in the world involved in implementing mail systems eventually participated or at least knew what transpired in the group. The discussion was to last ten years. In time, thousands of messages, and hundreds of thousands of words, were exchanged by the hundred or so MsgGroup participants.

The MsgGroup was among the first network mailing lists. There were other mailing lists, most of them unsanctioned, around the educational sites. The first widely popular unofficial list, called SF-Lovers, was devoted to science-fiction fans.

The header wars brought out the stubborn and strong-willed traits of the programmers. Operating conflicts between machines were only the half of it. Header troubles were also rooted in human disagreement over how much and what kind of information should be presented at the tops of the messages. People differed widely over how much header information they cared to deal with when looking at their mail.

Some programmers and mail programs included a lot more in their header fields than others did. They iced the cake with character counts, key words, and various esoterica. Critics meanwhile argued strenuously for economy, opposing an information overload. They saw too many fat and frivolous headers—the electronic equivalent of noting the cotton-rag content of a sheet of stationery. Short messages with cumbersome headers always appeared top-heavy, out of balance, emphasizing the header rather than the message. Brian Reid at Carnegie-Mellon, who often sounded the voice of reason in the MsgGroup, was in the short-header camp. One day he received a sarcastic message from a colleague and posted it to the MsgGroup:

Date: 7 Apr 1977 1712-EST

From: Bob Chansler at CMU-10A

Reply-To: Cheese Coop at CMU-10A

Subject: Re: Close, but no cigar

To: BRIAN. REID at CMU-10A

CC: Chansler@CMU-10A

Sender: BOB.CHANSLER at CMU-10A

Message-ID: [CMU-10A] 7 Apr 1977 17:12:49 Bob Chansler In-Reply-

To: Your message of April 6, 1977

My-Seq-#: 39492094

Yr-Seq-#: 4992488

Class: A

Subclass: MCMXLVII

Author: RC12

Typist: Fred

Terminal: TTY88

FE-L#: 44

Reason: Did Godzilla need a reason?

Valid: Not before 12 Apr 1977 1321Z

Suspend: After 19 Apr 1977 0000Z

Spelling-errors-this-message: 0

Spelling-errors-to-date: 23

Weather: Light rain, fog

Forecast: Clearing by morning

Psych-evaluation-of-sender: Slightly unstable

Security-level: Public

Security-sublevel: 0

Authority-to-send: General

Authority-to-rcv: General

#-people-in-terminal-room: 12

XGP: UP-cutter not working

Ht/Wt-sender: 76/205

Machines: M&Ms available but almond machine is empty

M&Ms-Last Nickel: 17

HDR-chksum: 032114567101

-----------------------------------------------------------

Brian,

I do not understand your concern about the size
    of message headers.

Bob.

Why can't we configure headers to print only the pieces of the header we choose to read? Reid asked. “Go ahead and put in thirty-four different header fields,” he said. “All I ever really want to look at is ‘from'and ‘date.'” Others agreed. The ideal program would allow users to design their own headers. At least one elaborate mail system, Doug Engelbart's
NLS JOURNAL MAIL
, offered an “invisible information” feature that allowed selective viewing of a great deal of header data.

On May 12, 1977, Ken Pogran, John Vittal, Dave Crocker, and Austin Henderson launched a computer mail putsch. They announced “at last” the completion of a new mail standard, RFC 724, “A Proposed Official Standard for the Format of ARPA Network Messages.” The standard they were proposing contained more than twenty pages of specifications—syntactical, semantic, and lexical formalities. The RFC explained that the receiver of a message could exercise an extraordinary amount of control over the message's appearance, depending on the capabilities of one's mail-reading system.

In the days after the publication of RFC 724, the computing community's response was at best cool to the new protocol. Alex McKenzie of BBN was particularly outspoken. Postel, who had been a defender of the old RFC 680, was the least impressed by the new proposal. He came down hard on the assertion that this was to be an official ARPA standard. “To my knowledge no
ARPANET
protocol at any level has been stamped as official by ARPA,” he said. “Who are the officials anyway? Why should this collection of computer research organizations take orders from anybody?” There was too much emphasis on officialism and not enough on cooperation and perfection of the system. “I prefer to view the situation as a kind of step-by-step evolution,” he said, “where documents such as RFCs 561, 680, and 724 record the steps. To make a big point of officialness about one step may make it very hard to take the next step.”

The RFC 724 team absorbed the criticism. Six months later, under Dave Crocker's and JohnVittal's leadership, a final revised edition of RFC 724 was published as RFC 733. This specification was intended “strictly as a definition” of what was to be passed between
ARPANET
hosts. They didn't intend to dictate the look and feel of message programs or the features they could support. Less was
required
than
allowed
by the standard, they said, so here it was. And there it sat.

A number of developers wrote or revised mail programs to conform with the new guidelines, but within a year of RFC 733's publication the persistent conflict picked up again. Of particular concern, RFC 733 headers were incompatible with a mail program called
MSG
(in spite of the fact that its author, JohnVittal, had helped write RFC 733).
MSG
was far and away the most popular mail program on the
ARPANET
.

A hacker's hacker,Vittal had written the
MSG
program in 1975 out of sheer love for the work.
MSG
was never formally funded or supported, “other than by me in my spare time,” he explained. But soon,
MSG
had a user community of more than a thousand people, which in those days meant a huge portion of the wired world. Vittal had used Roberts's
RD
mail program, which was great for handling two or three messages at a time, or even a short message stack, but Vittal was getting twenty messages a day now and wanted a program to manage them with greater ease. “What
MSG
did was close the loop,” he said, “so that you could parcel messages out to various other files, called folders, and ultimately answer and forward.”

Vittal, in fact, became widely known for putting the word “answer” into the lexicon of e-mail. He invented the
ANSWER
command, which made replying to messages a cinch. Recalled Vittal, “I was thinking, ‘Hey, with an answer command I don't have to retype—or mistype!—a return address or addresses.'”

An inspiring model,
MSG
spawned a whole new generation of mail systems including
MH
,
MM
,
MS
, and a heavily funded, Pentagon-sponsored project at BBN called
HERMES
.
MSG
was the original “killer app”—a software application that took the world by storm. Although there was never anything official about it,
MSG
clearly had the broadest grassroots support. It was all over the network; even ARPA's top folks in the Pentagon used it. If anything was the most widely accepted standard, it was
MSG
, which reigned for a long while. (A few people at BBN were still using
MSG
in the 1990s.)

Vittal's
MSG
and his
ANSWER
command made him a legendary figure in e-mail circles. “It was because of Vittal that we all assimilated network mail into our spinal cords,” recalled Brian Reid. “When I met him years later, I remember being disappointed—as one often is when one meets a living legend—to see that he had two arms and two legs and no rocket pack on his back.”

More than just a great hack,
MSG
was the best proof to date that on the
ARPANET
rules might get made, but they certainly didn't prevail. Proclamations of officialness didn't further the Net nearly so much as throwing technology out onto the Net to see what worked. And when something worked, it was adopted.

The more that people used the
ARPANET
for e-mail, the more relaxed they became about what they said. There were antiwar messages and, during the height of the Watergate crisis, a student on the
ARPANET
advocated Nixon's impeachment.

Not only was the network expanding, it was opening wider to new uses and creating new connections among people. And that was pure Licklider. One of the most stunning examples of this began with one of the original IMP Guys—Will Crowther.

A small circle of friends at BBN had gotten hooked on Dungeons and Dragons, an elaborate fantasy role-playing game in which one player invents a setting and populates it with monsters and puzzles, and the other players then make their way through that setting. The entire game exists only on paper and in the minds of the players.

Dave Walden got his introduction to the game one night in 1975, when Eric Roberts, a student from a class he was teaching at Harvard, took him to a D&D session. Walden immediately rounded up a group of friends from the
ARPANET
team for continued sessions. Roberts created the Mirkwood Tales, an elaborate version of Dungeons and Dragons set in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. The game stretched on for the better part of a year and was played mostly on Walden's living room floor. One of the regulars was Will Crowther. Where the other dozen players chose names like Zandar, Klarf, or Groan for their characters, Crowther's was simply Willie, a stealthy thief.

Crowther was also an ardent cave explorer. And his wife Pat had achieved renown among cavers for having been part of a small group that discovered the first known link between the Mammoth and Flint Ridge caves in Kentucky. The combined 144-mile system was the longest known cave in the world. Crowther was the cartographer for the Cave Research Foundation. He used his off-hours to plot intricate subterranean maps on a BBN computer.

In early 1976 Will and Pat divorced. Looking for something he could do with his two children, he hit upon an idea that united Will the programmer with Willie the imaginary thief: a simplified, computer version of Dungeons and Dragons called Adventure. Although the game did not use actual maps of the Kentucky caves, Crowther based the geometry of Adventure on stark mental images of those underground chambers. The iron grate through which players passed at the start of the game was modeled on those installed by the Park Service at entrances to the Flint Ridge system. He even included a caving in-joke or two; the “Y2” inscribed on a rock at one point in the game is caver shorthand for a secondary entrance.