Sunday, March 11, 2012

Walking through MIME fields: Snubbing Steve Jobs to Star Trek tech • The Register

Walking through MIME fields: Snubbing Steve Jobs to Star Trek tech • The Register: "It was through Andrew that Borenstein met email pioneer Einar Stefferud, active in internet standards and credited with inventing the first internet mailing list, at a conference where X.400 - rival to SMTP email - had dominated discussions.

Stefferud was impressed by Borenstein and hooked him up with the person who was to become his MIME collaborator, Ned Freed. Borenstein's interest was in the exchange of multimedia content while Freed's interest lay in building a gateway between different email systems. By the time MIME went to the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) for discussion, people had piled onto MIME's third aspect - sending non-English without it becoming gibberish.

"I was the only person with a paper not on X.400. I ran into these people who believed email can't do what I've already made it do [with Andrew]," Borenstein said of the X.400-heavy event. "Einar made a beeline for me."

Getting MIME accepted internationally at the IETF was a matter of politics"

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