Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available

globenewswire.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 152 posts

Re: Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available

#81

Post by behringer »

romwell wrote: post #78
behringer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the commenters on that article wrote: > Well, I think this works differently. The email just includes a link to a Google webpage with the email. It’s still just an email sitting in your inbox. It doesn’t remove itself automatically. So it's not a standards issue at all.

It's an abuse of the standard. The email standard was built so that you can check your email with a client, and view the contents offline at your convenience, archive, back up, etc. Google's email proposal kills this functionality. When was the last time I used this, you may ask? On Saturday. I was in one of the slot canyons in Utah with zero signal, and, while taking a break, I wrote several emails in my Opera email…

The email standard allows links in emails.

Re: Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available

#82

Post by chx »

joshuas wrote: post #67
icc97 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference in code bases is striking [0]: > The Windows version of Eudora is written in C++. The source tree consists of 8,651 files in 565 folders, taking up 458 MB. There are both production (“Eudora71”) and test (“Sandbox”) versions of the code. > The Macintosh version of Eudora is an entirely different code base and is written in C. The source tree consists of 1,433 files in 47 folders, taking up 69.9 MB. [0]…

Back then you didn't have a lot of choice of what language to use, windows was MFC on visual studio and Mac was codewarrior(I think). The Mac and Windows versions were written by two separate teams even though we sat next to each other, and I can't think of any code shared between them, anything we could have shared would have been trivial to write from scratch. I have no explanation for the enormous size of the Mac…

I'll be damned. Joshua Stephens for real? I know your name from the Eudora Extended Message Services API docs -- though that was long ago. There were like four names there. How much of that was your work :) ?

Re: Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available

#83

Post by tinus_hn »

bdamm wrote: post #20
jasonjayr wrote: post #2

"Eudora was specifically designed with the idea that standards are a key to successful adoption. Indeed, the rapid acceptance of the Internet is largely due to the standardization process. Published standards are what allow applications from multiple sources to cooperate with each other. Without standards organizations would only be able to use their own applications together, and not those from outside. Also, by all…

This is beautiful. One of the "so obvious it's invisible" truths of the modern age, and I nearly forgot that Eudora and other pioneers of the age were making a somewhat risky choice to only support standard protocols and eschew the proprietary mailers. Most of them are now long dead yet POP3, IMAP, SNMP chug along. At the time, though, it wasn't so clear.

POP3 is horribly inefficient and SNMP is a security disaster waiting to happen. At least POP3 isn’t widely used anymore.

Re: Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available

#84

Post by userbinator »

djsumdog wrote: post #32
edmanet wrote: post #11

Damn. The "bad" words have been sanitized. Seeing the programmers' frustrations as they appear in the comments enhances the experience when viewing old code like this.

It's funny how in most corporate/commercial code past 2005 or 2010, you'll rarely ever see profanity in comments. I've never put profanity, or even any jokes, in comments. I really try to keep my professional code professional. Even on my own OSS projects I tend not to do that anymore.

Unfortunate that we (as a collective --- not something I personally believe in) seem to think that that is being "professional", and that it is somehow a reason to make everything as bland and soulless as possible, and that that is somehow better? I agree that a lot of code has lost its "character", so to speak.

The Linux kernel still retains much of its fucks and shits, and apparently has gained a whole lot of crap: https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/

Re: Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available

#85

Post by ddingus »

behringer wrote: post #81
romwell wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an abuse of the standard. The email standard was built so that you can check your email with a client, and view the contents offline at your convenience, archive, back up, etc. Google's email proposal kills this functionality. When was the last time I used this, you may ask? On Saturday. I was in one of the slot canyons in Utah with zero signal, and, while taking a break, I wrote several emails in my Opera email…

The email standard allows links in emails.

You are missing the spirit of the comment.

This is not a matter of can it be done and be standard, but whether it should be.

That's just as important here.

Re: Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available

#86

Post by wila »

tinus_hn wrote: post #83
bdamm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is beautiful. One of the "so obvious it's invisible" truths of the modern age, and I nearly forgot that Eudora and other pioneers of the age were making a somewhat risky choice to only support standard protocols and eschew the proprietary mailers. Most of them are now long dead yet POP3, IMAP, SNMP chug along. At the time, though, it wasn't so clear.

POP3 is horribly inefficient and SNMP is a security disaster waiting to happen. At least POP3 isn’t widely used anymore.

Most likely the post you're replying to meant smtp instear of snmp. Makes more sense for a remark about a mail client. I see this typo more often.

Re: Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available

#87

Post by ddingus »

userbinator wrote: post #84
djsumdog wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how in most corporate/commercial code past 2005 or 2010, you'll rarely ever see profanity in comments. I've never put profanity, or even any jokes, in comments. I really try to keep my professional code professional. Even on my own OSS projects I tend not to do that anymore.

Unfortunate that we (as a collective --- not something I personally believe in) seem to think that that is being "professional", and that it is somehow a reason to make everything as bland and soulless as possible, and that that is somehow better? I agree that a lot of code has lost its "character", so to speak. The Linux kernel still retains much of its fucks and shits, and apparently has gained a whole lot of crap:…

Amen!

We have ugly words for ugly feelings ideas places things. Putting them in there is no crime.

Re: Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available

#88

Post by brightsize »

latigidigital wrote: post #53
eltoozero wrote: post #3

In 1999-2001 when I was doing dialup tech support, running into a customer with Eudora was a dream compared to the nightmare of basically any other contemporary mail client around: Outlook and Outlook Express. EarthLink even made their own abomination of a mail client called Total Access, IIRC it could import and export Eudora dbs.

Don't forget Pegasus! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_Mail

Or Email Connection!

http://web.archive.org/web/19980212160741/http://www.email-c...

edit: fix link

Re: Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available

#89

Post by schoen »

jacquesm wrote: post #62
jgrahamc wrote: post #30

Oh, cool. I can finally fix the bug/feature that whenever someone replied to an email from me they got warned about profanity because of my last name :-)

Hehe, to be completely fair with you the first time I came across your name I thought you were pulling a very long prank. But you don't get to choose your name. An architect in the Netherlands had 'Rothuizen' as his last name, which translates to 'Rotten houses', not the best name for an architect so he changed it to 'Rotshuizen', which translates as 'Houses built like rocks'. Much better :) In your case I wouldn't c…

Do you suppose the original etymology of "Rothuizen" could have been an older Germanic name that might have been rendered as "Rodehuizen" in modern Dutch? (I'm thinking of modern German "rot" corresponding to modern Dutch "rood".)

Wiktionary seems to believe in a Middle Dutch "*rōt (in placenames)" referring to the color red.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...

Re: Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available

#90

Post by behringer »

ddingus wrote: post #85
behringer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The email standard allows links in emails.

You are missing the spirit of the comment. This is not a matter of can it be done and be standard, but whether it should be. That's just as important here.

I'm not missing anything. There's nothing wrong with placing links in emails. The link is good, presumably in and out of gmail, and is clearly a gmail feature, not an email feature. There's no problem here.
Post reply on HN