[Artemisia] Beating the Undead Zombie Horse with Gilson's Linen Ladies Underwear and IBM 360 punchcards

[Dr. C. M. Helm-Clark Ph.D.]

> Then there's the ever popular 'argument' that if we're not all
> supposed to top-post then why does the e-mail program put the cursor
> at the top? 

The Short Reply:
Before Microsoft Windows 2 and the Lotus Corp. Symphony Office Suite,
email programs *didn't* put the cursor illogically at the top of the
email above the quoted text.

The Long Reply:
Because geeks, not English teachers, wrote common mass-market
spaghetti-code email programs like Outbreak Express (Email the plague to
your friends as spam!) and Lotus Tokes (Use overpriced bad business
programs to email the plague to your friends as spam!)

Back when rocks were soft, personal computers did not exist and I got my
first email account, there were no mailing lists as we know them today
and command mail programs didn't quote the email you were replying to
unless you were a true nerd and knew the tilda commands to get it to do
so - and if you recall unix mail and its predecessors, the cursor always
ended up UNDERNEATH the quoted email.  But then, the folks at Bells Labs
and Wang
(remember Wang?) and DEC (remember DEC?) not only could program, they
understood good organization too.  This assumes, however, that you were
lucky enough to be on a DEC TOPS system or PDP Unix system.  If you were
unlucky, you were stuck on PRIMOS or VMS where it took a manual open in
your lap to fight your email into submission...

I used to post to the Rialto (before it disintegrated into dreck and
flames post 1994) from a VMS system.  You couldn't quote a previous
email using the mail system under VMS.  You had to save the email off as
a text file.  Open the file in something like EMACS (which I still use
ocassionally, by the way), write and run a command to insert the "> " at
the start of each line, delete superfluous lines and then intersperse
your replies
to the quoted text.  Then, after saving it all as a new text file, you
got VMS mail to concatenate the text into the body of an email - and
only then you might have something that could be emailed.

It was folks like Microsoft and Lotus and Borland (remember Borland?)
that gave us email programs that started the whole "top-posting" crap.

Email used to be difficult...  These young kids using PCs, they haven't
a clue that the world of email used to be very different from today

> :- John, as a guy, wants linen for a French woman's
> undergarment.....<weg>

Lookie here, you young whippersnapper: back when I was your age, we had
to grow our own flax and carry it to the school house everyday, in the
snow, 5 miles, up hill both ways, so we could make it into paper tape to
program our ancient DEC PDP-8...

ttfn
Therasia's evil twin