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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!
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.
I bet the subject was "MAKE MONEY FAST"
...I'll procrastinate tomorrow...
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
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!
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
"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
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
I send you this file in order to have your advice
See you later! Thanks
Attachment #1 -- me&judy.jpg.vbs
"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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
"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"
Umm. No.
300 baud modems were indeed 300 bits per second. You're correct in the "symbols per second" thing, but everything including and below 2400 baud used one symbol per bit, so in those cases baud=bps. Higher modem speeds still run at 2400 baud, but use phase shifting and other tricks so that each symbol stands for N bits. For example, a 9600 bps modem works by each symbol representing 4 bits. 2400 baud times 4 bits/symbol equals 9600 bits per second.
For the purposes of this discussion, "symbols per second" means you're sampling the carrier N times per second.
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)..
--
Another Verizon customer, DSL'less in Seattle.
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.
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;$q"
Reagan came into office in Jan 81. I remember Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, and I was only 4.
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In less than 70 years, one persons lifetime, we went from the first airplane to Apollo 11. My grandmother could remember the first time she saw an automobile, and the horse and wagon the family owned. In less than 60 years computers have gone from building sized machines that added numbers slightly faster than a slide rule, to Palm Pilots. I learned how to use a slide rule in high school. I'm only 36, and I remember the first color TV my family got. We live in a different world than our parents did, and our children will live in one that is different still.
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What's in a name? Lots!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
wasn't Englebart's email program limited to only sending email to users of that machine?
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
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.