Pine was originally conceived in 1989 as a simple, easy-to-use mailer
for administrative staff at the University of Washington in Seattle.
This constituency had previously been using a very nice mail system
derived from UCLA's "Ben" mailer for the MVS operating system, but
when the cost of maintaining our MVS system became prohibitive, we
needed to find a Unix-based mailer that preserved the user-interface
strengths of "Ben". Our goal was to provide a mailer that naive users
could use without fear of making mistakes. We wanted to cater to users
who were less interested in learning the mechanics of using electronic
mail than in doing their jobs; users who perhaps had some computer
anxiety. We felt the way to do this was to have a system that didn't
do surprising things and provided immediate feedback on each
operation; a mailer that had a limited set of carefully-selected
functions.
At that time, we could not find any Unix mailer (commercial or freely
available) that met our requirements. Consequently, we reluctantly
concluded that we would need to develop our own. The Elm mailer seemed
like a reasonable starting point since its source code was freely
available, so we started modifying it. Today there is virtually no Elm
code left, and Pine has evolved so that many "power-user" features may
be (optionally) enabled. We have tried to remain true to our original
simplicity and ease-of-use goals by providing optional features for
sophisticated users. In fact, if none of Pine's options are enabled,
the latest version has almost the same look-and-feel as the very first
version.
One of the greatest problems with most mailers on Unix systems is the
editor. One can normally choose between emacs and vi. We experimented
with some versions of emacs and settled on a hacked version of micro
emacs. Eventually it became heavily modified and tightly integrated
with the rest of Pine. One of the main features of having a tightly
coupled editor is that it can guide the user through editing the
header of the message, and Pine takes great care to do this. A very
simple and efficient interface to the Unix spell command was also
added. The emacsstyle key bindings were retained, though most of the
other wild and wonderful emacs functions were not. The Pine
composition editor is also available as a very simple stand alone
editor named pico.
Also working at the University of Washington is the original author of
the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). IMAP is a functional
superset of POP, and provides a way to manipulate mailboxes on remote
servers as if they were local. Specific advantages of IMAP over POP
include: support for inbox access from multiple computers, access to
more than one remote folder, selective access to MIME message parts,
and support for disconnected operation.
Not long after the Pine project began, The IMAP author had finished
writing the "c-client" library as an interface to IMAP and as a switch
between drivers for IMAP mailboxes, Berkeley mail files and Tenex mail
files. In time, "c-client" became a full messaging API with support
for RFC-822 parsing, MIME parsing and decoding, SMTP and NNTP drivers,
and so forth. Great care was taken to make the code writing the mail
files robust against disks filling up, and inter-process locking in
order to guarantee mail file consistency. It was clear that Pine would
benefit greatly from using the c-client to access mail storage so the
original low-level Elm code was replaced by calls to c-client library
routines. Consequently Pine can write and access a variety of
different mail file formats and new ones can be added by creating a
simple driver. In addition the c-client does a very careful job of
doing all the RFC 822 header parsing and achieves the highest
compliance with the RFC.
Most of the work done on Pine from 6/92 to 6/93 focused on changes
needed to support a truly distributed electronic messaging environment
(e.g. remote folder manipulation), and getting Pine to run on DOS
(which was a lot of work). The first version of PC-Pine (3.84) was
released in July 1993, and included first steps toward integrating
news and email access in Pine. Doing the DOS port was very difficult
for a variety of reasons, but especially because of DOS memory
management (or lack thereof). However, simply porting Pine 3.07 to DOS
was not sufficient. For a desktop mailer such as PC-Pine to be useful
at UW, it was necessary to fully support access to existing remote
saved-message folders, as well as local (desktop) folders -- and of
course, the remote INBOX. Accomplishing this required extensions to
IMAP, a new version of the IMAPd server code, and extensive work in
Pine to support multiple collections of folders.
The principal reason for porting Unix Pine to DOS was to obviate the
need for PC users to transfer files between their PC and the Unix
system running Pine. Now it is possible to save messages directly to
the PC's filesystem, and to directly include PC files in outgoing
messages. And with Pine's MIME capability, binary files (e.g. word
processing documents, spreadsheets, image files, executables) may be
directly attached to your messages.
With Pine 3.90, significant new functionality has been added, notably
aggregate operations for manipulating groups of messages at once, the
first (alpha) release of PC-Pine for the Winsock network interface
standard, and greatly improved Usenet (News) support. One of the early
interpretations of the name "Pine" was "Pine Is No-longer Elm"; today
a "Program for Internet News and Email" seems more apropos.
The University of Washington Pine development team (part of the UW
Office of Computing & Communications) includes:
Project Leader: Mike Seibel
Principal authors: Mike Seibel, Steve Hubert, Laurence Lundblade*
C-Client library & IMAPd: Mark Crispin
Pico, the PIne COmposer: Mike Seibel
Bug triage, user support: David Miller*
Pine Web Pages: Lynne Bivona, Jaime Prosser
Documentation: Many people!
PC-Pine: Tom Unger, Mike Seibel
Project oversight: Terry Gray, Lori Stevens
Principal Patrons: Ron Johnson, Mike Bryant
Additional support: NorthWestNet
Initial Pine code base: Elm, by Dave Taylor & USENET Community Trust
Initial Pico code base: MicroEmacs 3.6, by Dave G. Conroy
User Interface design: Inspired by UCLA's "Ben" mailer for MVS
* Emeritus
We'd also like to acknowledge the following contributions and contributors:
Pine for VMS: Portia Shao and Yehavi Bourvine
Pine for OS/2: David Nugent
Special mention: David Wall
Bug reports, bug fixes, ports, suggestions & encouragement:
The world-wide Pine community, including...
Shoa Aminpour Richard Gering Richard Murphy
J.J. Baily Gordon Good Il Oh
Billy Barron Bob Gregory Mike Ramey
Chris Beecher Ed Greshko Phil Rand
John Benjamins Dmitri L. GringauzJochiam Richter
Birko Bergt David Halliwell Thomas Riemer
Ken Bobey Peter Hausken Tim Rice
Andy Brager Jeff Hayward Alexis Rosen
D.K. Brownlee Ron Johnson Michael Ross
Brian Burriston William Kreuter Bob Sandstrom
Bill Campbell Pekka Kytolaakso Michael F. Santangelo
Russel Campbell Barry Landy Shin-ya Satoh
Donn Cave Chris Latham Corey Satten
Richard Cheever Jon Lebo Michael Shepard
Mike Coghlan Allen Leonard Vladimir Solnicky
Justine Comer Robert L. Lewis Alan Thew
Chuck Cooper Bruce Lilly Jason R. Thorpe
Barry Cornelius Matthew Lyle Rick Troxel
Michael A. Crowley John Mackin Marc Unangst
Judith M. Dixon James Matheson Edward Vielmetti
Jeff D. Doran Nancy McGough Ross Wakelin
Tony Flemming Mark McNair Rich Wales
Matthew Freedman Pete Mellor David Wall
Richard Fritz Dave Miller Bob Williams
Marcelo A. Gallardo Don Miller Steve Woodyatt
Adam Garrett Robert Morris
