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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?"
Wouldn't be much different, I'd just be on the phone alot more, and have alot more paper notes lying around. It's not like it is the only source of communication in the world. Try imagining life without electricity. I wouldn't put e-mail even in the top 100 of the "inventions" list, even if it is/isn't an invention...
What?
Was it intended to be named:
a)Email
b)E Mail
c)e-mail
d)email
I'd honestly like to know what the original intent was... and no, electronic mail doesn't count. (why? my post, my rules)
No sig for you.
Mine was on the Pig & Whistle BBS in Montreal (684-0282, I think it was), back in 1987.
Running on an Atari 800xl, maxed out with 256k RAM plus four full floppies (180K each), all hooked to the net with a blazing fast 1200 baud modem. I was limited to my puny little 300 baud.
...And then came Fido...
---
Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
And yet I sitll hear people talk about this as a "new" technology. Human perception is such a tricky thing. I'm personally glad it has become mainstream. Even with the curse of SPAM it still has a world of uses that are worth while. Now we just have to hope the Internet as a whole isn't just a 'fad'. ;)
RudeDude
Perl/Linux/PHP hacker
They say that the internet takes people away from real interaction, but I have found it to be the opposite.
For example, I met a Brazilian woman in a chat room, and, after months of sending hundreds of e-mail messages and then talking on the telephone, I went to Brazil and lived with her family while she taught me Portuguese.
Without e-mail, I would have had much less connection with Brazilians.
What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
Started using e-mail in 1988, when it was 'bout half as old. I remember trying to explain to people what e-mail was. It was one of the great lessons of my life, because people looked at you dumbly, no matter how eloquently or simply you described the process.
Then one day, it "caught on." It had reached the media, and enough people knew how it worked that suddenly everyone seemed to know how it worked. As a geek, I didn't spend half an hour explaining e-mail anymore. I got right down to the nuts and bolts of showing people how to use it.
We used BITNET, back then...
-Jared
information is immaterial
At my moms work, if their email servers go down, the whole company shuts down, all 10,000 people.
People have become too depenedent on email in some cases. They can't do their job without it.
Every time a new virus comes out the spreads through email they have to shut down the whole system because all the employees are too stupid and still don't know better then to open the attachments.
But email has improved their productivity by at least 25% and the cost is worth it to them.
The thing I hate most about email is that it is so impersonal. People fire people though emails.
They applogize to them thourgh them, ask people out on dates. It gives the anti-social a way to not interact. I hate that
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
Email is French for enamel if I remember correctly. I believe the first e should have an acute accent though. The plural is emaux.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
If the patent office then was as fscked up as it is tody, e-mail could have been patented.
And it would have gotten nowhere. It would not be the major phenomenon it is today.
This is the perfect example with which to vigorous beat about the head and shoulders those who defend software patents as necessary to innovation. "What about e-mail, you dork?"
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Telex sprang from the same source as the Volkswagen automobile: The creative growth era of the early Third Reich. It was devised as a means of distributed military command and control messages and data in a time before we eve had a structure for data processing machinery. What existed at that point in time was 455 bps Baud automatic telegraph and dial-using telephone exchanges. The original Telex was essentially (director-controlled; yes, the Europeans were doing hat then) rotary telephone switches modified to carry DC telegraph lines, providing a switched service for teletypewriters in the same way as was done for telephones.
There is even a brief discussion on how to access telex from your email.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There's some significant insight contained in this post. I work for a company that, stats wise, generates 4x the volume of email of any other company in Canada, on a per-employee basis (we've been doing email on IBM mainframes since before most companies had computers).
Email is much more than just another form of messaging. I've seen email used as a form of decision records, as a primitive form of version control (the email thread contains each revision of the document in question), as discussion threads, and even as a form of middleware for some very significant applications (like train dispatching). In a company like mine, end-to-end delivery of email messages that exceeds 30 seconds is seen as a serious degradation of service (no kidding!)
Consitent, timely, and reliable delivery of email in large companies (outside, perhaps, of large dot.com online sales companies) is arguably more important than nearly any other form of networking.
Maybe it's about time some new standards are formed? I bet the SPAM problem would be much better if we had some form of SMTP-authorization that was standardized. I know there have been many attempts, but no two clients support the same few methods... Open-relays worked 30 years ago, but times change.
On a lighter note, I couldn't imagine life without email.
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