A little mail database history

It is my dear wish that PARC would bundle up all their historical publications and reissue them in a single series. It would be worth every penny and perhaps be as important as The Art of Computer Programming.

Or if not, it'd still be pretty damn cool.

In any case, the bright folks at PARC were exploring various ways of mixing email and databases back in the early '80s. As far as I can gather, there were at least two systems, Walnut and Babar.

A reimplementation of Babar, aptly named Celeste, lives on in Squeak. Alas, Steven Putz's 1988 paper on Babar (Babar: An Electronic Mail Database ) doesn't seem to be online anywhere (although, if you're a RDMS junkie, peek at his Using a Relational Database for an Inverted Text Index (in pdf)). Alas the second, neither does the 1985 Walnut paper by Donahue and Orr (Walnut: Storing Electronic Mail in a Database ). Fortunately, there is available a followup paper on a followup system to Walnut: Browsing Electronic Mail: Experiences Interfacing a Mail System to a DBMS (uncompressed postscript, alas the third).

Whew! That's a lotta stuff.

Now that Niel's thrown down the challenge, I'll have to see what I can do with Celeste.

And thus the Monkeyfist Email Wars commence!

And if we're sneaky enough, maybe we can drive Cameron to technical investigatory distraction!