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Eric Allman (born 1959) is a computer programmer. The openly gay programmer developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley. If anyone can be called the father of modern Internet e-mail, it has to be Allman.
Born in El Cerrito, California, Allman knew from an early age that he wanted to deal with computing later in life, breaking into his high school's mainframe and later using the UC Berkeley computing center for his computing needs.
In 1973, he entered UC Berkeley, just as the UNIX operating systemIn computing, an operating system OS is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations, as well as running application software such as word processing programs and web browsers. In general, t began to become popular in academic circles. As the UNIX source codeSource code (commonly just source or code is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. In modern programming languages, the source code which constitutes a software program is usually in several text files, but was free, the local hackerHacker is a term used to describe different types of computer experts. It is also sometimes extended to mean any kind of expert, especially with the connotation of having particularly detailed knowledge or of cleverly circumventing limits. The meaning ofs quickly made many extensions to the AT&TAT&T formerly an abbreviation for American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation is an American telecommunications company, publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol T . AT&T provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommuni code. One such extension was delivermail, which in 1981Events January-February January Sarawak Chamber found January 1 Greece enters the EEC January 1 Palau becomes self-governing January 4 Sheffield police arrests Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper January 16 Protestant gunmen shoot and wound Bernadette D turned into sendmail. As an MTA, it was designed to deliver e-mail over the still relatively small (as compared to today's Internet) ARPANET, that consisted of many smaller networks with vastly differently formats for e-mail headers.
Sendmail soon became an important part of BSD, the Berkeley Software Distribution and continues to be the most widely used MTA on UNIX and Linux systems today, despite its somewhat complex configuration syntax and frequent abuse by Internet telemarketing firms. In 1998, Allman founded Sendmail, Inc., headquartered in Emeryville, California, to do proprietary work on improving sendmail.
Allman lives in Berkeley, California with his partner of over 20 years, the lead developer of BSD, Marshall Kirk McKusick.
Allman is credited with popularizing the Allman indent style, also known as BSD indent style.
