I am deeply offended by this tee-shirt. It is clearly an attempt to infringe my invention, vmail. After I created vmail in 1987[*] (inspired by the vn newsreader, it was a screen-oriented wrapper on the Berkeley UNIX port of the RAND-MH electronic mail system), it was quickly adopted by a large number of people, and then just as quickly dropped when its extensive technical limitations became apparent. Also I was unaware of the very similar elm, created a year earlier. Nonetheless, I do feel that in a very real sense I created vmail first, in that it came before other systems that came later.

For the record, I would also like it known that in 1985 I wrote a very clever piece of software for the Mac classic that allowed one to draw graphics in a window on the Mac from a UNIX session running over telnet[**], thus allowing UNIX software to have a GUI. I no longer have the floppy disks on which ‘MacTermPlus’ was developed, but I regard it as having been the retrospective inspiration for SunOS windowing, which I believe was introduced in 1983.

Justin

[*] I actually did this. It seems that people did use it - I couldn’t keep up with the bug–fix/enhancement requests and retired from maintaining it in 1989. From the source code, it appears that at that date I was still using the terminology ‘mail’, not ‘e-mail’ (as in RAND, http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/notes/2009/N3017.pdf) or ‘email’. So, would it be regarded as an email system?

[**] I actually did this too. It was really, really slow. Ok, to be honest it was even slower than that.