Pine (mail client)
More info
- Creator
- University of Washington
- Released
- 1989
- Type
- Mail client
- Successor
- Alpine
The University of Washington's email client for normal people — and the origin of the pico editor, and therefore of nano.
Pine arrived in 1989, aimed at staff and students who weren't computer scientists. Menus were few, the commands sat at the bottom of the screen and help text was everywhere. The name supposedly meant "Pine Is Not Elm", later reinterpreted as "Program for Internet News & Email". UW was developing its IMAP server in parallel, and Pine became one of the clients that made IMAP viable.
Its built-in editor, pico, caught on well beyond email. The licence, however, was not free: UW prohibited modified versions, so Debian couldn't ship Pine in its main archive. That prompted GNU to write nano as a free pico replacement. In 2007 UW released the successor, Alpine, under the Apache licence — about twenty years too late for most of its users.