Twenty years ago, on 11 March 1992, Nathaniel Borenstein sent the world’s first e-mail attachment. Although it created little excitement beyond the small group of people involved with the project, today Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions technology (Mime, for short) is used an estimated trillion times a day.

Speaking to TechCentral by telephone from the US, Borenstein says Mime, the standard he helped create, isn’t in the news much, in part because it’s been so successful. Beyond allowing for non-text attachments, what makes Mime special is that it allows for non-Roman — or, more specifically, non-Ascii — characters in e-mail, making it possible for messages to be sent in scripts like Japanese and Sanskrit.

“Part of how we designed Mime was with accessibility in mind,” says Borenstein. “We wanted to ensure that any kind of media could be sent easily and so we created a mechanism where a well-defined description of a format could be recognised.”

From the outset, Borenstein thought support for new Mime types would expand beyond the initial 16, but he says he had no idea it would grow to the more than 1 300 types that exist today. He says he expects this number to increase further given the growth of mobile computing.

In the world of computer network engineering there are regular memoranda called requests for comments that set standards for the Internet and related systems. Borenstein says there’s a tradition of publishing tongue-in-cheek ones on 1 April, including one that “proposed a new type for matter transport using Dan Quayle’s brain as an example”. Quayle was US vice-president under George HW Bush.

“In recent years there have been suggestions of types for documents for 3D printers. It seems it’s not only the serious things I say that are coming true now, but my jokes, too.”

These days, Borenstein’s primary work is for e-mail company Mimecast, a fitting move considering his history and one he says was made independent of his work with the e-mail protocol. “I definitely found it amusing to end up working for a company called Mimecast, and they were pretty tickled at the idea of having me there, I’m sure.”

He’s still involved with Mime, though, and says he is working on a type for reputation data, “a way to encapsulate and share data about the reputation of an entity”. Much of the early work on this reputation type is focused on websites and domains, but Borenstein says eventually it “could be used to rate car dealers, too”.

When Steve Jobs got the sack at Apple, he started another computer company called NeXT. Borenstein would eventually be offered a job there, one he went on to turn down. “I’ve got no regrets about that decision, but a lot of people have given me a hard time about it,” he says.

“I had tremendous respect for Jobs; he was the only captain of industry I really admired. Money wasn’t his number one priority and that affected my politics. That alone made him different in the industry. His priority was making the best and most beautiful products. I didn’t share that aim, but I admired him anyway.

“However, I knew from what I’d heard what it was like to work for him. [Jobs] would exploit your talents and reward you for them, but if there was ever a dispute, he was right and you were wrong. I knew a user-experience designer who found that out and decided he’d rather be somewhere else. You had to accept that to work at Apple. It might be a character flaw, but I’m too stubborn and egotistical to do that.”

Borenstein turned down other chances to get involved early on with companies that went on to be huge. He also had a first-hand tangle with the great IT bubble. “I started [a company] that did make me a temporary millionaire … until the bubble burst,” Borenstein says.

The company was First Virtual Holdings, the first Internet payment system. It listed in 1996 and was enjoying such strong growth Borenstein says if the figures were to be believed “within 16 months every person on the planet would be a customer. It was totally ridiculous.”

When the bubble burst, First Virtual Holdings share price plummeted from US$26/share to 13c.

Borenstein says he thinks much of its success comes from the Mime name. He was advised by a colleague to come up with something “catchy” and Mime was the result. “If I’d called it ‘RFC1341’ it wouldn’t be spoken about so much, though it might have been no less important.”

Despite the importance of Mime, Borenstein hasn’t made much money from it. “Open standards are very unlikely to succeed unless they’re unencumbered. If we’d charged anything we would’ve had competing standards because someone else would’ve made one.

“The most common thing laypeople say to me is ‘imagine if you got a penny every time Mime is used’, so I worked it out. As of today, my annual income would be roughly the GDP of Germany,” says Borenstein. “If I got a millionth of a penny, my annual income would be about half of [US politician] Mitt Romney’s. I think most of us could live pretty happily on that. I definitely could.” — Craig Wilson, TechCentral