The History of MIME

HISTORY FOFMIME From plain text...to multimedia attachments Email has come a long way. Used by billions worldwide as one of the most common forms of communication, it was MIME that gave us the platform to move from text to multimedia attachments. 1965 First known email sent by Tom Van Vleck at MIT. 1971 1970s - 1980s First attempt to define email standards. Email used for non-English text in non-standard, non-interoperable ways. 1980 - 1982 1982 First discussion/planning of multimedia mail (Jon Postel and others). Basic email standards stabilized; only small changes to this day. 1984 1988 BBN Diamond/Slate System (Forsdick) - research project, then unsuccessful commercial product. NSF project funds translation between BBN Diamond and Andrew formats, via ODA. The first multimedia message successfully exchanged between two different software systems - the project is declared a success. 1985 DARPA Experimental Multimedia Mail system (Postel et al) - research project. 1988 1985 NeXTMail (Jobs et al) - first successful commercial multimedia mail, does not interoperate with anything else. Andrew Message System (Borenstein et al) - first multimedia mail with thousands of users. 1993 1992 - MIME standard published, 16 initial MIME types. - Andrew and NeXTMail both convert to MIME format. - Email exchanged between Japan, US, and Israel using MİME for English, Japanese, and Hebrew characters in April Fool's RFC defines MIME type for matter transport - a joke, of course. 1992 2001 E92012 one message. Barbershop MIME message by Bellcore's Telephone Chords. -Open source metamail MIME implementation released, ported to nearly every platform in the world. By 2001, only 40% of Internet email was in English; ten years earlier, the vast majority was. MIME used approximately 1 trillion times/day. - MIME adopted for WwW as well as email. 2012 -MIME has 1309 MIME types. - MIME being used for 3D printing - essentially matter transport, not a joke! ("model" is the first top-level MIME type not in the original specification). The Wikimedia Commons has 12.2 million MIME objects. Of these, over 12 million are images, 10.4 million of them in JPEG format. mimecast unified email management