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<h3 class="appendixsec">D.3 From Stephen Gildea</h3>
<p><a name="index-Gildea_002c-Stephen-2236"></a><a name="index-Stephen-Gildea-2237"></a>
In 1987 I went to work for Bolt Beranek and Newman, as Jim had before
me. In my previous job, I had been using RMAIL, but as my folders tend
to run large, I was frustrated with the speed of RMAIL. However, I
stuck with it because I wanted the GNU Emacs interface. I am very
familiar and comfortable with the Emacs interface (with just a few
modifications of my own) and dislike having to use applications with
embedded editors; they never live up to Emacs.
<p>MH is the mail reader of choice at BBN, so I converted to it. Since I
didn't want to give up using an Emacs interface, I started using MH-E.
As is my wont, I started hacking on it almost immediately. I first
used version 3.4m. One of the first features I added was to treat the
folder buffer as a file-visiting buffer: you could lock it, save it,
and be warned of unsaved changes when killing it. I also worked to
bring its functionality a little closer to RMAIL. Jim Larus was very
cooperative about merging in my changes, and my efforts first appeared
in version 3.6, distributed with Emacs 18.52 in 1988. Next I decided
MH-E was too slow and optimized it a lot. Version, 3.7, distributed
with Emacs 18.56 in 1990, was noticeably faster.
<p>When I moved to the X Consortium I became the first person there to
not use xmh. (There is now one other engineer there using MH-E.) About
this point I took over maintenance of MH-E from Jim and was finally
able to add some features Jim hadn't accepted, such as the backward
searching undo. My first release was 3.8 (Emacs 18.58) in 1992.
<p>Now, in 1994, we see a flurry of releases, with both 4.0 and 5.0.
Version 4.0 added many new features, including background folder
collection and support for composing <span class="sc">mime</span> messages. (Reading
<span class="sc">mime</span> messages remains to be done, alas.) While writing this book,
Bill Wohler gave MH-E its closest examination ever, uncovering bugs
and inconsistencies that required a new major version to fix, and so
version 5 was released.
<p>Stephen Gildea, June 1994
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