Eric Allman - Episode 85

About this episode

Eric Allman discusses the origins of Internet email and software development at planetary scale.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes ACM Fellow Eric Allman, a foundational figure of the early Internet as the developer of Sendmail and its precursor Delivermail (for the original ARPANET) in the late 1970s at UC Berkeley. Sendmail is the mail transfer agent that powered a large portion of global email infrastructure through the formative years of the network and helped shape how messages move across the web. Allman is also an ACM Distinguished Engineer and was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014.The conversation explores the origins of Internet email, the messy realities of building software that must operate at planetary scale, and what lessons today’s engineers can learn from the systems and design decisions that quietly underpin modern computing. Eric shares his work at UC Berkeley spanning a variety of domains, from user interfaces to neural networks. He and Scott touch on current AI capabilities, including their personal experiments in assistive coding with current models such as Claude, and discuss into the programming languages Python, C#, TypeScript, and JavaScript. Eric also shares…

People in this episode

Host: Scott Hanselman

Guest: Eric Allman

Topics covered

• Internet email origins
• software development
• AI capabilities
• programming languages
• computing retirement

Keywords

• Sendmail
• Delivermail
• AI
• programming languages
• software engineering
• Internet Hall of Fame
• UC Berkeley

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: ACM, UC Berkeley, Internet Hall of Fame

Products: Sendmail, Delivermail, Claude, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript

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