Eric Allman, who founded email routing system Sendmail, tells
this week's edition of technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio that he
would "never have agreed" to the project had he known how much work
it was going to be.
"Berkeley [at University of California] was supposed to build
the internet platform for research, and one of the things they
needed was an internet mailer, an SMTP mailer, and so I let
myself get talked into writing that piece of code," said Allman,
who was not paid for his work.
"To be honest if I had known how much work it would have been I
would probably never have agreed to do it. It was harder to write
than I expected. Most people who have worked on this sort of thing
say the same; it looks deceptively easy till you actually get in to
try and do it."
Allman's email routing system is used all over the world still
to send emails between systems. It began as what Allman calls a
"technical solution to a political problem" when students wanted to
access the Arpanet network which was the predecessor to the
internet.
"I said what they really want is email, so I can connect the
Arpanet to the network we already had at Berkeley called the
Berknet and forward email around, it was a very, very simple
program and it worked, sort of," he said.
That early system, Delivermail, morphed into Sendmail, still the
most popular mail transfer agent (MTA) on the internet. It remains
the standard MTA in various Unix operating systems.
Allman did not form a company around his technology until the
late 1990s, and watched college contemporaries become millionaires
and leading lights of Silicon Valley. He was at college with Eric
Schmidt, the Google chief executive who used to run Novell, and Sun
Microsystems founder Bill Joy.
"There were a lot of people at Berkeley at that time who were
incredibly, scarily bright people, many of whom have gone on to be
well known in the industry today," said Allman. "One person said
Bill [Joy] had more ideas in an afternoon than he would have in a
month. People would follow Bill around just hoping to get an idea
they could turn into a PhD thesis."
Allman said that he could not have formed a company around
Sendmail to rival the products of Silicon Valley in the 1980s such
as Apple or Microsoft or Sun because email was not ubiquitous until
much later.
"Email wasn't the phenomenon then that it is now. Email was
something that the geeks wanted but the commercial people didn't. I
could have started earlier but I probably would have gone out of
business because there wouldn't have been many people willing to
buy it," he said.
Disclaimer: We hope you find OUT-LAW’s content useful. It’s prepared by the lawyers at Pinsent Masons. Please remember, though, that it’s intended as general information only. It’s not legal advice. If that’s what you’re seeking, please
contact us. See also: our
full disclaimer
