Slashdot Mirror
Email Turns Thirty
milquetoast writes: "The NYTimes has an article on e-mail's 30th birthday. where would we be without it?" Wearing out a lot fewer delete keys, that's where. The NYT also has an interview with Tomlinson, and a speculative article suggesting email will kill the fax machine (not any time soon). Tomlinson may think he gets a lot of email, but he doesn't.
I send you this message to in order to wish you a Happy Birthday.
<<Happy Birthday.exe>>
Happy Birthday! Email Is 30 Years Old
To: Watson@bell.net
From: Alex@bell.net
Subj: You could be a millionaire next week!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
In order to celebrate the 30th birthday of email, Microsoft has agreed to pay $1 to some little girl each and every time this email message is forwarded. But to qualify for this charity donation, you'll have to forward this message to at least 60 people as soon as you get it.
I'd have to MANUALLY search for free porn, I'd NEVER get to Make $1500 Per Week At Home and I'd actually have to CALL in sick.
Nope, spam started in the early / middle nineties, when two lawyers (Cantor/Siegel) spammed hundreds of newsgroups, in order to sell their lawyerly immigration services.
Needless to say, that the usenet community took a very dim view on the issue, and literally harrassed them off the net.
They later wrote a book (something around the line: "How to get rich quick by selling penis extension pills on the Internet").
E-mail spam followed shortly after.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I mean, really. In the 30 years since the first email message, scientists have figured out how to STOP HAIR LOSS NOW!!!, ADD INCHES IN MINUTES!!!, bypass Federal drug laws by GETTING VIAGRA IN YOUR OWN HOME!!!, and STOP YOUR SNORING INSTANTLY!!!
Really amazing when you think about it. None of those amazing scientific inventions would've been possible without email.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
Anyone can get email (witness AOL). You have to be *important* to receive a fax.
(I've got Karma to burn)
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
you do know that you can print pdfs?
dave
(login not working)
No, until my local travel agency can start e-mailing me the "Last Minute Club" great holiday deals to Cancun for $997 All Inclusive, the fax is still going to have a place in our offices.
Mr. Ska
I get twice that in spam a day. (Which never reaches my inbox thanks to Spambouncer)
Total e-mail, I get ~1000 a day, only 2-3 of which actually go into my inbox. The rest being filtered by procmail into various mailing list folders to which I subscribe. Out of those 2-3 at least one is a forward from my mother which has 10 pages of AOL addresses and a little poem on the bottom which tells me to forward this to 10 people and my cat will have puppies.
But thats a different complain altogether...
Do you Gentoo!?
If I'm going to speed, I'm going to do it right!
I never understood people who speed 20 MPH over on the freeway - you only save 25% of your time. Instead speed 20 MPH in a school zone - you save 50% of your time, and may get a free lube job on the underside of your car if you hit a fat kid.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
that's right folks. email turns 30 today. now how could have it existed that long when
algore invented the internet in the mid 90's....
anyway, if you forward this message to 30 people Bill Gates will personally send you one dollar and donate 10 cents to a cancer charity in Nigeria which will in turn deposit the money in a bank account you opened for them in the united states and use the money to advertise the newest greatest weight loss pills ever invented which also happen to make you look 10 years younger but only if you order 6 dozen cookies and the recipie from neiman marcus using the credit card with the $100,000 limit that you recently got pre-approved for with no credit check and no deposit so you can purchase your own .BIZ or .INFO domain just like nike and pepsi and be a webshop with 24hour free unlimited porn downloads of britney spears, which by the way you can talk to live by dialing 1-900-i-love-spam, which is a registered trademark of the Hormel corporation, and tastes good on crackers.