Eric Paul Allman (born September 2, 1955) is an American computer programmer who developed

sendmail Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet. A descendant of the ...

and its precursor

delivermail The ancestor of sendmail, delivermail, also by Eric Allman, is a mail transport agent that used the FTP protocol on the early ARPANET to transmit e-mail to the recipient. Due to deficiencies in using FTP to send e-mail, a new protocol was created ...

in the late 1970s and early 1980s at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

. In 1998, Allman and Greg Olson co-founded the company Sendmail, Inc.

Education and training

Born in

El Cerrito, California El Cerrito ( Spanish for "The Little Hill") is a city in Contra Costa County, California, United States, and forms part of the San Francisco Bay Area. It has a population of 25,962 according to the 2020 census. El Cerrito was founded by refug ...

, Allman knew from an early age that he wanted to work in computing, breaking into his high school's

mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

and later using the UC Berkeley computing center for his computing needs. In 1973, he entered UC Berkeley, just as the

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

operating system began to become popular in academic circles. He earned B.S. and M.S. degrees from UC Berkeley in 1977 and 1980 respectively.

Sendmail and Syslog

As the Unix source code was available at Berkeley, the local hackers quickly made many extensions to the

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

code. One such extension was ''

'', which in 1981 turned into ''

''. As an MTA, it was designed to deliver

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

over the still relatively small (as compared to today's Internet)

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foun ...

, which consisted of many smaller networks with vastly differing formats for e-mail headers. Sendmail soon became an important part of the

Berkeley Software Distribution The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Ber ...

(BSD) and it used to be the most widely used MTA on Unix based systems, despite its somewhat complex configuration syntax and frequent abuse by Internet telemarketing firms. In 1998, Allman and Greg Olson founded ''Sendmail, Inc.'', headquartered in

Emeryville, California Emeryville is a city located in northwest Alameda County, California, in the United States. It lies in a corridor between the cities of Berkeley and Oakland, with a border on the shore of San Francisco Bay. The resident population was 12,905 a ...

, to do proprietary work on improving ''sendmail''. The logging format used by the MTA, known as

syslog In computing, syslog is a standard for message logging. It allows separation of the software that generates messages, the system that stores them, and the software that reports and analyzes them. Each message is labeled with a facility code, i ...

, was at first used solely by sendmail, but eventually became an unofficial standard format used by other unrelated programs for logging. Later, this format was made official by in 2001; however, the original format has been made obsolete by the most recent revision, .

Other contributions

Allman is credited with popularizing the Allman indent style, also known as BSD indent style. He ported a Fortran version of

Super Star Trek ''Star Trek'' is a text-based strategy video game based on the ''Star Trek'' television series and originally released in 1971. In the game, the player commands the USS ''Enterprise'' on a mission to hunt down and destroy an invading fleet of K ...

to the C programming language, which later became BSD Trek, and is still included in various Linux distributions as part of the classic bsdgames package. He was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in August, 2006 in

Telluride, Colorado Telluride is the county seat and most populous town of San Miguel County in the southwestern portion of the U.S. state of Colorado. The town is a former silver mining camp on the San Miguel River in the western San Juan Mountains. The firs ...

, and in 2009 he was recognized as a Distinguished Engineer by the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

. In April 2014 he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Personal life

Allman, who is openly gay, lives in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...

, with

Marshall Kirk McKusick Marshall Kirk McKusick (born January 19, 1954) is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD UNIX, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 to ...

, who had been his partner for more than 30 years before they married in October 2013. McKusick is a lead developer of BSD; the two first met in graduate school.

References

External links

Homepage as of 2010-10-29

Linkedin.com profile

Former homepage at Berkeley
*

Salon Salon may refer to: Common meanings * Beauty salon, a venue for cosmetic treatments * French term for a drawing room, an architectural space in a home * Salon (gathering), a meeting for learning or enjoyment Arts and entertainment * Salon ...

article about sendmail going commercial (December 1998)
Biography at Sendmail.com (see "Chief Science Officer")
{{DEFAULTSORT:Allman, Eric American computer programmers Free software programmers UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni People from Berkeley, California Unix people LGBT people from California 1955 births Living people