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Happy Birthday! Email Is 30 Years Old
pgrote writes: "Happy Birthday Email! It turns 30 and Yahoo! News has an article here. Of course, they have the @ sign listed as a + sign. There is an interesting look at the history here. Two neat things about this: 1) The creator can't remember the first message, but he knows it was in ALL CAPS and 2) Can you imagine your life without email now?"
I personally believe email is the killer app of the Internet. Sure, there's other stuff, like news, chat and, recently, the web, but I think email is what made it all happen. If there never was email, I think the whole Internet thing wouldn't have taken off at all. Yeah, people give credit for the recent take off to the world wide web, but I'm talking about the Internet getting to the stage it was in when the web was invented. Oh well... All I'm saying is, email rocks!
Consequently, in our Business Continuity Plan, e-mail was designated a "Tier 2" application. This means that it was slated for recovery only after the critical business applications were restored. It was felt that e-mail was a nice-to-have that could easily be replaced with the telephone and fax in a crisis.
This perception changed dramatically on September 11. We quickly learned how e-mail had become integral to the business. It was the communications mechanism that facilitated most of our internal information exchange. Restoring e-mail moved from second-tier to our highest priority because it was critical to recovery and to communicating with our scattered employees. With hundreds of dislocated people, it was the most reliable way for our clients and our employees to reach specific individuals.
When future historians talk about the way technology revolutionized business, e-mail will be on the list. My company realized we can't do business without it.
Did ya fuck her?
It's always a refreshing moment when one reads an article like this where a technology innovator (I'd say hero, but lately I like to reserve that term) is truly appreciative of what he's done but, while appreciative of what the impact has been, not motivated to drive an agenda with it.
Yeah, this might be an intellectual flame - but I'll bet many agree with the basic point.
I've often wished I had the guts to take the same action as Donald Knuth and get rid of my e-mail address:
Of course, I'll be the first to admit that DEK's time is more in demand than mine.
An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan. -- George Patton
>No dead trees and no stamps.
Right. Lord knows, we all use clean electrical power sources these days!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Can you imagine your life without e-mail now?
I try to, oh how I try to imagine, every waking minute of my day, how beautiful life would be without e-mail. I hate e-mail, I'm chronically abused and assaulted by e-mail. I have a boss who wields e-mail as a weapon. When he's pissed, he buries me under e-mail, and then wants to know why I can't get anything done. I've had days where he's sent me two-hundred e-mails, some with seven or eight attachments, paragraphs and pages and volumes and books of e-mail.
This turd's office is only fifteen feet away from my cube, but I can't get a face-to-face with him. Because he's got e-mail. It's not a communications medium, it's an ass-covering medium.
When I quit this job (and I have an interview this week) I'm going to mass-print a copy of every e-mail he's ever sent me on every goddamned printer in the company. It'll make our NIMDA infection look benign.
You know, I had always wondered if the very *FIRST* person (or at least the first few) got filthy rich doing this scam via email.
I figured that one of the everlasting qualities about this scam is that there were so many people that actually believes/ed in it..
Im figuring that people are still getting money _to this day_ because of theres peoples still seeing it for the first time..
He can't remember his, which is kinda sad. Can you remember yours? It would be fun (for real) to hear what people first used this "medium" for.
Along with the "+" sign error, the article mentions that email helped spread the Nimda virus. As we all know the only thing helping Nimda spread is Microsoft's security hole. Hmmm... some journalist didn't check his information.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Tesla invented the radio damnit! Not Marconi!
Fax and voicemail have been around for a very long time. The earliest patents for fascimile machines are only slightly newer than those of teletypes. (19th century). You could even get cheap machines as WW2 surplus, many ham radio operators played with the technogy in the 50's and 60's. It was a niche technogy (mostly used by the newspaper photo distribution services) until the Japanese wanted a way to send documents to each other electronically. An ASR-33 doesn't cut it when you have a page of kanji to transmit. Until then the west was happy to send each other telex messages.
Voicemail is otherwise known as an answering machine. I admit I had email before I owned an answering machine, but in the days before Bell allowed "foreign" devices to connect to their lines, answering machines were fairly uncommon.
Certainly once you could get a magnetic wire recorder, you could do an answering machine. The oldest unit I have heard of, dates from the late 30's. (I am sure someone tried it with phonograph technology, but I don't think it was commercially viable.)
If you are looking for a business practice changing technology that is newer than email, try FEDEX.
One question I proposed for the Nerd Purity tests (the long ones with the possibility of >500 point scores). 2 points for having an email address in high school. If you are class of '85 or earlier, add 2 points for each year. Class of '75 or earlier, add 5 points per year.
As to the + vs @ nomenclature: I remember in 1977 spending 10 minutes explaining to a business card printer just what that blob was (at sign didn't cut it, he needed "commercial at" before he got it. There wasn't a typewriter handy so I could point.), and that "DP@MIT-ML" was correct, and "DP @ MIT-ML" wasn't.
Oh yea, as to the UPPER CASE, the commonly available terminals of the day didn't provide it.
-dp-
Organizer:New England Rubbish Deconstruction Society;The NERDS,first US team in the UK Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars
There are 3 problems with return receipt as it is now implemented:
Some email clients to support it, like mine (elm).
The user may not look at his email for days, as I often don't.
The user may ignore it, as I often do when I use Outlook.
What's needed is some standard. The fact that there isn't one after all these years suggests that users are happy with the level of reliability for the urgency of the messages.
The inventor of email said he invented email not because anyone wanted it but because it was a neat idea. Probably if he had thought automatic return receipt was a neat idea, we'd have it now.