Background
Allman, Eric was born in 1955 in California, United States.
Allman, Eric was born in 1955 in California, United States.
Born in El Cerrito, California, Allman knew from an early age that he wanted to work in computing, breaking into his high school"s mainframe and later using the University of California Berkeley computing center for his computing needs. In 1973, he entered University of California Berkeley, just as the Unix operating system began to become popular in academic circles. He earned Bachelor of Surgery and Master of Surgery degrees from University of California Berkeley in 1977 and 1980 respectively.
In 1998, Allman and Greg Olson co-founded the company Sendmail, Incorporated. As the Unix source code was available at Berkeley, the local hackers quickly made many extensions to the American Telephone & Telegraph Company code. One such extension was delivermail, which in 1981 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, 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 (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, Incorporated., headquartered in Emeryville, California, to do proprietary work on improving sendmail.
The logging format used by the MTA, known as syslog, 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 Reconstruction Finance Corporation 3164 in 2001, however the original format has been made obsolete by the most recent revision, Reconstruction Finance Corporation 5424.
Allman is credited with popularizing the Allman indent style, also known as BSD indent style.
He was awarded the Telluride Technical Festival Award of Technology in August, 2006 in Telluride, Colorado, and in 2009 he was recognized as a Distinguished Engineer by the Association for Computing Machinery. In April 2014 he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
Member Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Association for Computing Machinery, Usenix Association (vice president, treasurer 1992-1998).
Life partner, Marshall Kirk McKusick.