The Internet isn’t known for looking backward at its history all that often, and yet once in awhile it’s worth a look back to appreciate why things we do every day work the way they do. March 11 is one of those opportunities. It is the 20th anniversary of MIME, which stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. You never think about it, and yet every time you attach a photo or a Word document, or practically anything else to an email message, you’re using it. It was created by Nathaniel Borenstein, a computer researcher who, 20 years ago, worked for Bellcore, the research arm of the Baby Bell telephone companies. At the time, no one really gave much thought to the idea that email could or even should comprise any more than basic text messages, and when attachments were involved, incompatible formats caused the kind of headaches that we would consider unacceptable today. Curiously obsessed with the evolution of email, he teamed up with Ned Freed, a fellow Internet pioneer, to write the MIME standard that is the backbone of email attachments today, supporting more than 1,300 types of files and enabling billions of email users to ignore any worries about compatibility among email programs.
As someone who used to write email software for a living, it’s hard to UNDER estimate how important MIME is to where the internet is today. If you’ve never worked in the bowels of email, you may have no clue what it is — but that’s the point.
Email is now 40+ years old. It’s one of the more ancient protocols on the internet, and yet it’s still one of the most critical and resilient and one we all depend on, for all some pundits keep insisting it’s going to die, really soon now.
I’ve been involved in two formal investigations for replacing email over the years, and a couple of informal ones. None gained any real traction, because the reality is that email is amazingly flexible and we’ve been able to innovate it greatly in place, rather than having to figure out how to replace it and gateway things back and forth. A huge part of that flexibility is MIME, and it’s ability to give people the ability to innovate the content forward but maintain compatibility through reduced functionality as well.
So his contribution to where we are today is mostly behind the scenes, but MIME is a huge advance that allowed us to move the net forward instead of tear it apart and try to reconstruct it.
Well done. Well done.
This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Nathaniel Borenstein, Creator of MIME Format. This article is copyright 2013 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.