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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?"
Happy birthday email!
but it sure feels more like 50-55.
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
Before email I never knew there were so many women interested in showing me their tata's with such snappy come-ons as "We are all 18....and horny!" Who would ever have thought it! Me of all people would have women fawning over me like that and all thanks to email!
HT
Yeah. And it's not pretty. I like having my spam condensed (mostly) into nice, easily deletable, chunks in my inbox. Telemarketers and junk mail are much harder to get rid of. Junk mail must be thrown away, and I'm a busy guy, ya know? Telemarketers have a knack for calling JUST in the middle of dinner. Email is perfect for consolidating the load. Thanks!
Please note that was a (bad?) attempt at a joke. I don't need to modded down as troll.
No sig for you.
Who would have imagined 30 years ago, the amount of SPAM email that gets sent now, and if they did what would they have changed to stop it!
`find / -name "*your_base*" -exec chown us:us {} \;`
I bet the subject was "MAKE MONEY FAST"
...I'll procrastinate tomorrow...
that's funny, I get lots of messages in ALL CAPS that I can't seem to recall. But I do know the gist was something like:
HOT HOT HOT TEEN SLUTS WAITING FOR YOU
---------
Get back to me when my brain starts working.
Ah, the beauty of email lies in its wonderful flexability and ease of use. No dead trees and no stamps. It's just as easy to send a 1,000 line message as a 5 line one. Our only job now is to make sure that it stays out of the evil hands of the United States Postal Service...
Was the second one Make Money Fast! with QWERTYUIOP! ?
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?
Not even the creator remembered the exact day when this happened. It was only a vague "autumn of 1971". Can someone make a suggestion to Mr. Tomlinson to set a date so that people can celebrate more easily, when it turns 50?
¦ ©® ±
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
We'd never know that "I Love You" ;-)
We'd probably have a new 'Outlook'!
Ahh.. I think I could do without that crap anyway.....
Just think in all that time the RFC are still not implemented with any security in mind.
HELO
FROM: bill@microsoft.com
RCPT TO:you@friend.com
DATA
blah blah blah....
.
QUIT
NOOP
NOOP
Only 'flamers' flame!
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
What percentage of dial-up accounts hit 56.6? In my experience the phone lines will rarely support anything over 33.6 or even as low as 28.8. Just because the modem is rated for 56.6 doesn't mean it is practicly standard.
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
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!
ATTENTION!!! $100 CLUB/LGS CASH CLUB MEMBERS and anyone who wants more money... VERY IMPORTANT INFO TO HELP YOU MAKE MORE MONEY GUARANTEED IS IN THIS LETTER!
Hello
Welcome to this powerful group and thank you for your efforts to add to this team! My name is Ben and just so you know this is not SPAM I am the one who put this group together. Together we stand to make alot of money in this and any future companies this group merges into. However We will only be successful if we continue to grow very rapidly! Currently our group posesses 8-10 "Heavy Hitters" these people NEED YOUR HELP!!! There are many ways to HELP OUT and put alot of CASH IN YOUR POCKET at the same time! As any NETWORKER who actually makes money could tell you HIGH QUALITY LEADS and TARGETED ADVERTISING are the 2 most important things! For those of you who know me you can skip a lin................
Of course e-mail is great, but at first it was used to comunicate with a few people across the same network. What about the development of the DNS structure? The ability to have domain names and usernames for e-mail is a lot different from the original design of it.
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
i read in a book once, and perhaps it was made up, that the first message was something about forgetting a razor blade or shaver or toothbrush somewhere, and that's why email was made up? any truth to this?
"FIRST POST!"
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
hmmm, e-mail is older than I am (26yrs). and I measure myself through the things I've seen. I remember Ronald Regan as a very young child. I recall my parent's last throes of back-to-the-land/cold-war self-sufficency. I was astounded as the first Space Shuttle launch took us around the earth and flew us back home on wings. I was glued to the TVs when the Challenger exploded. I was there when faxes were pasted hourly on the walls of Boston's china-town as Tienamen square unfolded.
I lost friends in an act of terrorism that the world had never seen before, or even believed possible outside of cheap paperback fiction.
I have done all these things at a distance, I have made friends and effected change on continents that I may never visit.
I have dipped my toes in the greater waters of mankind.
All this in less than 30 years.
How will my children look back when they are my age?
Will they remember a world before the arrival of the meta-verse that allows them to interact around the world, regardless of language, race, time, or class?
Will they look back with sepia-toned memories of the good-old days before corporate structures replaced government?
Might they think of us with scorn, as those who poisoned the earth and water that they inherited?
Or will they think of us as the generation that first tasted this fruit of true communication, and were alternately torn and brought together by it.
pioneers in a digital age where the hot metal was still fluid and a maleable medium, filling gaps and voids in the mold of society.
what will someone say about us in 30 years.
what do we want to leave as our legacy for our children,
food for thought.
"If I wanted your input on my pet project, I'd stick my hand up your ass and use you like a sock-puppet." - Muse
Just think about how much more healthy the online pr0n industry is, thanks to Ray Tomlinson.
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
Who can forget the countless times their favorite mailing list has been flooded with Me too! messages.
It's great how their are hierarchies of recognition and respect depending on what your e-mail addy is.
Me too!
Josh
Cool... I'm off to bluemountain to send myself a card.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
is the 30th 'birthday' of the e-mail virus!!
:)
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Happy Birthday.gif.exe
Yeah, we should shut down our entire lives completely and ignore everything else in the world except for this one horrible event?
B.S. It's time to get on with your life. A great tragedy occurred, but at some point you have to pick yourself up and live again. I suggest you seek therapy. You might be suffering from post-tramatic syndrome.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I hope for your sake this is a troll. This site is primarily "news for nerds. stuff that matters" (in theory). This is not a general news site. /. was considerate enough to abandon normal operations to provide the public with a service when it was greatly needed. That service is no longer needed. News sites are operating just fine so people can go there to get their info about WTC. Like you said, it's been almost 3 weeks. Believe it or not, life goes on. The world cannot and must not stop forever because of any tragedy no matter the magnitude. The WTC attack was a terrible thing. What would continuing coverage on a totally unrelated website accomplish? It would be unneccesary repetition. Maybe YOU need to get some priorites. I intend to live while I still have my health.
I send you this file in order to have your advice
See you later! Thanks
Attachment #1 -- me&judy.jpg.vbs
Websters says that it's e-mail. Oxford English Dictionary spells it both ways (e-mail and email).
I personally like 'e-mail', since phonetically 'email' could be pronounced EH-mail.
Look, I do not tell everyone about this, but I have an opportunity for you where you can make up to $7000 per week from your own home.
Everyone knows that the internet is synonymous with $$$, but until now, only a few people knew how to get the $$$.
I was looking at your resume, and it looks pretty good! Now, with times being as tough as they are, I want to let you know about a little tool at resume_goat.cx. This classy, non-trapping web site will submit your resume to all sorts of high tech employers out there just looking for people to recruit.
So you ask, how can this translate to $$$, well its this new technology called marketing! Sign up now by sending in $29.95 to yours truly, and I will let you in on my secret!
Troll Like a Champion Today
"Mr. Watson--Come here--I want to see you."
"Yes Mr. Tomlinson?"
"Hi! How are you? I send you this file in order to have your advice. See you later. Thanks"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Interesting seeing how many slashdot user emails are reworded etc. to stop them from getting spam.
e-mail is basically at the point where something new needs to be thought up that isn't propriatry (free as in free speech) and works quite well without the possibility of SPAM going through it.
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.
Then again, there's also one called "smeg."
If there were no email then there would be probably be an offline messaging feature of instant messaging. With access control lists built into most instant messaging providers, we'd have no spam. Sounds good to me.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Of course, there's spam. That's "new."
1) Refinance my mortgage
2) Get some HOT TEENAGE SLUTS
3) Buy printer cartriges
4) Take a free vaction to Orlando, Florida
5) Get a Legal Marijuana Alternative
6) Boost my windows reliability
7) Make my penis bigger
8) Become wealthy working at home
9) Have a personal relationship with God
10) Say HI! to Dan. He has some HOT TEENAGER SLUTS for me.
After all, if there wasn't email, how could I get PRIORITIES?
yeah, good point :P
I don't think it should be capitalized though since it's not a proper noun.
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
30 years with email, - optimistically I look forward to 30 days without a new outlook exploit
This UID is 7651 digits too high to subjectively infer IQ from.
>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.
With email, I get to exercise ALL of my 10 fingers. While with pen-based-mail only 3 get used -- and some use only 2 fingers.
I keep wandering how our parents managed life with only 2-3 fingers; must have been very boring. So what were they doing with the "other" hand?
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Don Knuth weighs in on this at the bottom of this page.
There is an article at Living Internet about the history of email. An interesting quote:
Commercial Email. In 1989, MCI Mail and Compuserve provided the first commercial electronic mail connection to the Internet through the Corporation for the National Research Initiative (CNRI) and Ohio State University respectively.
Does anyone else know of other early comercial implementations of email?
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.
What would the world be like with a + sign? Scary, but I think it's just the people at yahoo who seems to want this. http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=int ernetnews&StoryID=257307 shows the @ that we all know and love.
I have no idea what the original intent was, but Knuth says let's drop the hyphen. I have to agree with him. Think of how much time you would save by typing it email instead of e-mail. History shows language evolves to the point where the hyphen is omitted reguarly. Whens the last time you saw "main-frame" or "soft-boot"? Mainframe and softboot are the prefered forms, and for a good reason.
Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
I seems to remember watching a TV documentary about the early days of the internet. During a segment of the show, a guy who worked on the ARPANET project said the first email message send/receive was "HEL". The message is supposedly "HELLO" but the receiving program crashed after it got "HEL". Or maybe the sending program crashed? Can't remember which.
;-)
Kind of funny if this is true, because HEL could easily be HELP! And this is before Outlook 1.0
The whole thing could be a dream, or about something completely different so don't bet on it.
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
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.
ALL CAPS? I didn't think AOL was around in the 70's.
...a perfect anagram for "Hunt, Drink, and Love"
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
Happy Birthday Email!! ILOVEYOU! I send you this file in order to have your advice. It contains information about how to make $100,000 per month, no risk! That's right, obtain a prosperous future with a college diploma for only $99!
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
Cute.
And not, dispite what someone seems to think, offtopic at all.
--MarkusQ
The standard general answer to this question is that Brazilian women won't have sex with a man unless they are in love. However, they sometimes fall in love very quickly.
The specific answer is no. My problem is staying out of women's pants, not getting in.
Bush's education improvements were
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.
Give up, dude. Its a loosing battle. There never going to get it. Your wasting you're time.
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
That ppl are still having caps-only emails...
:-)
HI! I AM AN AOL USER I THINK THAT THE INTERNET IS A GREAT FEATURE NO I AM NOT SHOUTING AT ALL WHY DO YOU THINK THAT I AM DOING THAT FOR EVERYONE NEEDS TO GET AOL BECAUSE IT IS SO EASY
And we're better than this -- we don't have to use punchcards anymore
Karma whorin' since 1999
The term baud can be very misleading. Technically it is just ``symbol per second'' which can mean bits per second, but usually meant (back then) bytes per second, Bps, so 300 baud would be 300Bps = 2400bps, which is roughly 1/20 of 56kbps. It can also mean characters per second, i.e., 300*7bps (proper ASCII is only 7bit), and it originated with the telegraphs and morse code (dit-dit-dit-dah-dah-dah-dit-dit-dit!). Such confusion is why the term is rarely used these days.
Best Slashdot comment ever
He must of been an aol user.
Email is come-from-behind technology. Although it predates voice mail and fax by nearly 15 years, it is only in the last 5 years or so that it rivals them in popularity.
Despite its success, email hasn't supplanted either voice mail or fax. Nearly everyone who has email also uses voice mail or fax, often both at work and at home. In spite of the fact that both voice mail and fax can be sent as an email attachment, those two technologies show no signs of disappearing. The sales of fax machines continues to rise and voice mail appears to be at saturation.
As near as I can surmise, both voice mail and fax have a higher degree of perceived urgency than email does. This urgency comes from the urgency of the technology they supplement or replace. Voice mail is a stand in for a telephone call itself, the most urgent form of communication. Faxes replaced couriers, which also were reserved for the most important documents.
Email seems to be primarily used for non-urgent communication. Part of the reason is, perhaps, that the sender of email cannot be sure if the message has arrived. For voice mail, if you get the greeting and the beep, you are reasonably sure of delivery. For fax, the fax standard guarantees that the fax will not be sent unless it is being received at the other end.
In one way, the urgency of email will probably not be determined by the message but by the attachments. The ability of email to move, store and forward electronic documents in a standardized way may determine its future development.
In another way, the urgency of email will be raised by email messages generated by computer. Because email can be generated by computer much easier than voice mail and fax, more and more email could be of the alert variety that tells the recipient that something needs his attention.
As a result I would look for some kind of encoding that flagged an email as urgent beyond simply the opinion of the sender. For instance, the email addresses that users give out might someday contain some unique priority designation so that priority could be determined by the source of the message.
One can see the process at work now when sys admins have computers send email alerts to their pagers and cell phones.
Once urgency can be reliably defined in an email message it could change its fundamental characteristic, which at the moment is convenience.
I have 4 email accounts, but I never get any mail on any of them. The only message I got was from someone saying hello, and welcome to Outlook, and that was like a year ago. So, I suppose my life with email is exactly the same as it would be without email.
E-Mail is more than 30 years old. Doug Englebart's NLS system was doing email for years prior to '71, and infact, demonstrated it publically in '68.
Get your facts straight, gang.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
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!
Tomlinson apparently was the first to send E-mail via the Internet (or any network?), and he is said to actually have adapted a time sharing mail program to do this.
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"
-- MarkusQ
Tesla invented the radio damnit! Not Marconi!
TI has a system called MSG that functioned a text based email system. I used it in 1974 in Denmark and it had been in use for more than five years in the US I was told at the time. It connected all TI sites around the world but the system was based on an IBM 360 something.
Help fight continental drift.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
"QWERTIOP", two machines in the same room at Cambridge, supposedly according to here.
Stanford claims that they were the recipient of the first data communication.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
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
Oh, I like that. Now I can say "look at all that emaux I have" or "I sent the emaux to Al and Betty" today. Reduces the ambiguity of a plural form that can be the same as the singular.
Of course, it's entirely too cutsey to live, so scratch that idea. Please. In fact, delete this entire post before Jon Katz or some marketing droid picks it up. Please, I beg you.
(Apologies for the gratuitous Jon Katz hit)
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
So all I have to do is buy that time machine on ebay, go back to 1971, and kill the people who invented it. Then I'll never hear "you've got mail" again. Totally worth it.
"Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP or something similar."
What does he have against U?
Actually, many or most ./ers seem to be born after email was invented.
I used to call it "electronic mail" or "computer mail" or usually just "mail." Only in the mid- or late 1980s did I hear "e-mail."
What should our priorites be? Drop everything we do? Not move on? What kind of country would we become if that happened?
Let me tell that I'm more worried about the whole mess then most people. I understand how grave the sitution is. I still can't believe they are gone. I also realize that life must and will go on. There is no stopping that.
I feel deep regret for the people who lost thier lives and the brave souls that lost thier lives to save those people. I support our government and Bush 100%. I can't just stop everything I do and morn forever. I can't quit my job and join the Navy. That is not my place. That is not what God whats me to do. He's leading me somewhere. He has a plan for me in the days to come. My place right now is to live my life and not let the terrorist win. You sir, are suggesting we stop everything and live a life in terror. I rather be dead then to have my freedom taken away.
If anything our country has realized the value of life. Become right with God through his son Jesus. Not tomorrow. Not Sunday. Not in a month. Right now. You never know when you will die.
The journey is better then the end.
Back in high school in Fairfax County, VA, we had a couple of HP machines that we time-shared with the rest of the schools in the county.
We had a series of chat-type programs which were forbidden by the administrators, since we were supposed to use the computers for computing. (That is, generating square root tables and printing our names in an endless loop.) To implement these apps, we needed to have files with multi-writer access, which only the sysops were able to create, so what did we do? We cracked them, of course!
Even then, circa 1979, we knew what computers were *really* for.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
Is it
emai-l (the Japanese porn star from Star Trek)
ema-il (verb meaning "oozing from a French guy")
em-ail (Ebonics for "they are sick")
or
e-mail? (some special kind of mail)
I wonder. If only I had more information....
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
A tad off topic but cool anyway.
The first message ever transfered over what was to become Internet (it wasn't even ARPAnet at the time, I believe) was the three letters Log. It was the three first letters of Login: but the protocol stack crashed after three letters =).
Maybe the Microsoft brains crashed when they tried to type HTML and it became htm...
After email came about a month of yahoo chat rooms, then I progressed to icq, then irc where I learnt most of my knowledge about computers. Interestingly my range of friends started off very wide- people from hawaii, honk kong, malaysia and the states (I'm british). Now I mostly chat to UK friends. It was through IRC that I learnt about computers- usenet and then this thing called linux which by this time I just had to try. And so I'm here now not quite geek since I can't code except html. But without a doubt the reason I first used computers was for email, so thankyou to its inventor for more or less changing my life.
The hassle of typing combined with the intrusion of a phone call. No thanks.
Not unless it was spelled emmail. Vowels followed by one consonant and then more vowels are typically long, in English.
Utter tosh. This make work for thoroughbred Germanic lanuages, like German and the Nordic languages, but English has had too much of a Latin influence (for example, years of occupation by France) for such generalisms.
Try speaking to someone who has learned English as a second language. English may be very simple in terms of structure (no sex for nouns and suchlike) but what makes it difficult is pronunciation - they are next to no rules on how things are pronounced. You have to start using the language to learn it, it cannot be learned by reading rules in books.
There are unified messaging projects and products starting to come that will allow you to consolidate all your data. This has to be one of the most important time saving ideas. Get your voicemail on the web, listen to your Email or IM on the phone, Fax on the web, text to speech, etc.
Another consolidation that I really like, is Instant messaging products, like Tillian. I can now get my AOL/AIM/Yahoo/ICQ/IRC in one program. (The irc is ok, but I'll stick with mirc and bitchx)..
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Another Verizon customer, DSL'less in Seattle.
I think that any of the comments under is right. /almost/ right.
But you'll have to define whats email and whatsfile sharing.
But if u say that a email shall contain a adress, for example needing to include a @ sign and a domain, then can u say "That is the first email".
And I do not know the details of this message in 1971, but I suppose it is
It is not a big lie if u say this is the first email,thus there might be older emails than that.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
The article describes their usage of 300 baud modems in 1971. In 1989 I used a 1200 baud manual modem, and in 1990 a fantastic 2400 baud (with Hayes, whee!)
;-/
So during the 18 years between 1971 and 1989, the bandwidth had increased just 8x. Today, I have 2048kbit at home, giving me an increase of bandwidth the last 11 years of an astonishing 853 times 2400 baud, or 6827 times 300 baud.
What lies before us in the next decade is surely food for thought. Also, we'll need more bandwidth to cover for the year 2011 equavilent of annoying popup banner ads
Looks like a fish, drives like a fish, steers like a cow.
What if the internet had never come about?!?!?! We might all actually have lives ;)
...then the first reply must have been;
Stop shouting!
Cat.
Mail was pretty simple. Everybody who wanted to use it, created a file 'mail' in their home directory which was permitted append-only others. (You think ACLs are a new idea?). The mail program took your message, added a header, and appended it to the end of the recipient's mail box. (much like UNIX mail does, except that the destination mailboxes were decentralized).
The first multi-system mail had interesting routing features. I remember a message from Edmonton to Calgary (180 miles south of Edmonton) went south to the states, through New York and California before arriving in Calgary via Utah.
Not long afterwards I got introduced to Unix, and the Usenet. Needless to say I was hooked. I was soon expounding the values of email to everybody who would listen. -- trying to get them to understand why it was, in so many ways, better than fax, for most written communications.
It was almost a crusade -- trying to get as many people as possible onto email. Even back then, I was into remote administration -- running boxes from home over a 300 baud modem with a homemade terminsl program. I still remember one person replying to one of my emails:
The clock was accurate.Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Wow, I just celebrated my 30th on Monday, too.
He also conceived the now-famous ``+'' symbol to ensure a message was sent to a designated recipient.
+ was pretty famous for years before that. This is not the 5000th anniversary of addition. And how did they miss the correct symbol by such a margin anyway?
And, the top-of-the-line modem connection at the time operated at a snail-like 300 baud, roughly one-twentieth of the speed of today's standard 56.6 kbps modem.
300*20=6000
Calculators are cheap... please get one.
Another major stage in its development came in the mid-90s as the first Web browsers introduced the World Wide Web to the couch potato.
The world wide web must have been fairly lame before the invention of the browser.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
Reagan came into office in Jan 81. I remember Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, and I was only 4.
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In less than 70 years, one persons lifetime, we went from the first airplane to Apollo 11. My grandmother could remember the first time she saw an automobile, and the horse and wagon the family owned. In less than 60 years computers have gone from building sized machines that added numbers slightly faster than a slide rule, to Palm Pilots. I learned how to use a slide rule in high school. I'm only 36, and I remember the first color TV my family got. We live in a different world than our parents did, and our children will live in one that is different still.
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Oddly enough Oct 1, "The Price is Right" game show also had their 30th anniversary. Coincidence? I don't think so. Conspiracy? Maybe. Joke on us by God/Aliens? Probably. I wonder if they will cancel e-mail AND that game show when Bob Barker dies? ;)
"Make Carousal Fast!"
"Yes! You can gain Sanctuary in the privacy of your home!"
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Can somebody explain the history of uucp style email addresses?
Corporate Gadfly
Jonathan Archer: the most beaten up Enterprise captain in Star Trek history
What's in a name? Lots!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Why not do a readable Intercal contest instead?
If we assume that a spammer would have an automated program to generate the emails, as is done today, consider that the spammer's mailing lists would probably have been stored on punch cards; that would have been one hell of a stack of cards for each email the guy sent out. True, they could have stored the list on tape, but considering the availability of a card reader vs. tape drives (in an academic or research environment), I'd bet on the cards. And, each address would have to be hand -entered at some point, vs. the address scanning/mining of today. Ah, the good old days ;)
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Come to think of it, I've probably ruined more relationships with email than preserved them.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
wasn't Englebart's email program limited to only sending email to users of that machine?
As I was reading, realised that the quote was sightly wrong. The correct version is "What hath God wrought", same words, capitalized correctly. He quoted from the Bible, (book of) Numbers 23:23, per the Library of Congress.
5'16" is easy math, so why do so many miss it?
Hmm??? Likey likey??
Before @ addresses were common we had bang paths where our email would hop from host to host with the UUCP protocol.
0
mailto:sprintlink!exodus!andover!slashdot!stavr
According to one of Norway's most respected computer gurus, Gisle Hannemyr, this isn't correct; Email is older than 30 years. There is an article about this in the Norwegian computer magazine digi.no. I'll try to translate the most important bits of the article to English:
:-)
"- When we talk about e-mail being 30 years old (ie. it was invented in October 1971), it might be because Tomlinson also made an e-mail solution called SENDMSG and CPYNET for BBN's proprietary Tenex network in 1971."
Hannemyr further says that this is pretty irrelevant when it comes to e-mail over the ARPAnet (and Internet); "- It is e-mail we send over the today's Internet which is 30 years old. E-mail itself is much older, and have been around since the MIT-developed Compatible Time Sharing System in the sixties."
Whatever is right, I guess we all can conclude that without e-mail, we would have had time to live a normal life. All of us...
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No, I didn't write this signature
I think we really need to think how email played a part in the terrorist attack on 9-11-01. I wonder what the people who invented email are thinking now that their technology is being used for evil.
I heard they used IBM laptops too - wonder what IBM is thinking now that their tools are being used for terrorism.
There's a good case to be made for some inventions being public domain (or something similar)
Some mail servers treat addresses like substrings when they match more than one username on a system. So, mail to brian@somesite.com would be delivered to brian, brianm, brianr, and so on. However, brian+@somesite.com will only be delivered to brian, and not any of the others.
If I remember correctly, Carnegie Melon has a system like this.
So, indeed, the '+' sign is in fact used "to ensure a message was sent to a designated recipient. "
R.
Without E-Mail my fat white ass wouldn't have met the crazy nympho that I fucked and tried to leave. Just too bad the internet is home to stalkers she still hasn't left!!
The plural is emaux.
Kinda like emacs, right?
My other car is first.
I've always wondered what function of the dash is, obviously it is to be able to differentiate between email and e-mail I can see that quite well, what baffles me is what that distinction is, at a guess I would think it is a class distinction, but arguing with myself I would state class distinction is a purely British phenomena, so I'm still unable to understand this nuance of internet ettiquette. On further reflection I suppose it is akin to the difference between viruses and virii.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
Ok, I was half asleep when my Prof said this (so it may not be exact); but he's not the kind to BS, and he actually has the connections to these kind of people. He said it was something like:
Hey Mike, this is a test. Call me if you get this.
Yeah, the name is probably wrong and he might have been asking for a fax, but it just sounds so Engineer-like that I believe it.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
"
Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice
See you later. Thanks
"