OUT-LAW.COM
Friday, December 1, 2006
The man who invented the internet's most popular email routing
system says he would never have done it had he known how much
trouble it was going to be.
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 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.
