@mwl @millihertz

Has the world forgotten once again that mbox has not been an "it" since MMDF and S5R4 came along in the 1980s? "They" is the correct pronoun.

And the dots were #SMTP, not mbox.

http://jdebp.info/FGA/mail-mbox-formats.html

http://qmail.org/man/man5/mbox.html

https://man.archlinux.org/man/mmdf.5.en

#mbox #maildir #MMDF

@swagpussc (...continued)
In many ways the 1980s are a lost decade of #Unix, as during the 1990s and 2000s the cloners spent a lot of time reinventing 1980s stuff and working from 1970s samizdat knowledge, sometimes not knowing that the work had been done.

There were whole swaths of improvements and stuff that the cloners of the 1990s didn't have the money to even find out about.

I've written up a paltry few.

http://jdebp.info/FGA/inittab-getty-is-history.html

#init #inittab #MMDF
(continued...)

@cstross @marjolica

Since you mention Xenix, here's a couple of interesting historical tidbits:

One of the ironies of history is that #MMDF, which SCO Xenix had instead of #Sendmail, would have been far more popular had it been around just a decade later.

It's also interesting that if one is writing stuff for a virtual terminal on FreeBSD, one still has traces of Xenix around. The keymap(5) file format is much the same as the #Xenix one.