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Happy Birthday! Email Is 30 Years Old

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the don't-trust-anyone-over-30-named-sircam dept.

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?"

4 of 383 comments (clear)

  1. Email rocks! by rice_burners_suck · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

  2. More critical than we realized by Ldir · · Score: 5, Insightful
    My company had World Trade Center offices; our parent company was headquartered there and had a data center there. We also have offices all over the U.S. and a fair international presence. Our company has a fairly conservative approach to technology, viewing the revenue-producing, line-of-business applications as critical. Support applications such as office automation were considered nice-to-haves.

    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.

  3. Can you... by r_j_prahad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Can you... by Glytch · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You could also call down a BSA audit on your soon-to-be-former company. It's even more effective if some of their licenses mysteriously vanish. Wink wink.