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?"

Comments

One question...

[Omerna]

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)

E-mail helps people find each other.

[Futurepower(tm)]

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?

Before Email

[Alien54]

Of course, before email similar functions were (and Still are!) performed by Telex. There is a fascinating history of Telex here

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.