History and Technology
Until the 1990s being an open relay was a common configuration for a mail server and was often the default on UNIX systems at installation. This was due, in part, to the traditional store-and-forward method of getting e-mail to its destination. E-mail was passed from computer to computer (through and beyond the Internet) via modems on telephone lines. For many early networks, such as UUCPNET, FidoNet and BITNET, lists of machines that were open relays were a core part of those networks. Filtering and speed of e-mail delivery were not priorities at that time and in any case the government and educational servers which started the Internet were covered by a federal edict forbidding the transfer of commercial messages.
Read more about this topic: Open Mail Relay
Famous quotes containing the words history and/or technology:
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)
“Radio put technology into storytelling and made it sick. TV killed it. Then you were locked into somebody else’s sighting of that story. You no longer had the benefit of making that picture for yourself, using your imagination. Storytelling brings back that humanness that we have lost with TV. You talk to children and they don’t hear you. They are television addicts. Mamas bring them home from the hospital and drag them up in front of the set and the great stare-out begins.”
—Jackie Torrence (b. 1944)