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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?"
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
I bet the subject was "MAKE MONEY FAST"
...I'll procrastinate tomorrow...
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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"
Tesla invented the radio damnit! Not Marconi!
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
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
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
There are 3 problems with return receipt as it is now implemented:
Some email clients to support it, like mine (elm).
The user may not look at his email for days, as I often don't.
The user may ignore it, as I often do when I use Outlook.
What's needed is some standard. The fact that there isn't one after all these years suggests that users are happy with the level of reliability for the urgency of the messages.
The inventor of email said he invented email not because anyone wanted it but because it was a neat idea. Probably if he had thought automatic return receipt was a neat idea, we'd have it now.