Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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.
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"