Eric Paul Allman (born September 2, 1955) is an American computer programmer who developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

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

Education and training

Born in

El Cerrito, California El Cerrito (Spanish language, 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 United States census, 2 ...

, Allman knew from an early age that he wanted to work in computing. He used to break 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 used 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, multi-user 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., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

code. One such extension was '' delivermail'', which in 1981 turned into '' sendmail''. As an MTA, it was designed to deliver

email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

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 computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...

, 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 (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginn ...

(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, California, Berkeley and Oakland, California, Oakland, with a border on the shore of San Francisc ...

, 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, ...

, 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 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, Colorado, 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 (Colorado), San M ...

. 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 membe ...

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

Personal life

Allman, who is 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 Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

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

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 beauty salon or beauty parlor is an establishment that provides Cosmetics, cosmetic treatments for people. Other variations of this type of business include hair salons, spas, day spas, ...

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 LGBTQ people from California 1955 births Living people