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.

Comments

already happend

[Penguinoflight]

Am I insane, or did Email already kill the fax machine? I get about 20 emails a day, and not one fax. btw, F1rst P0st!!! :-)

Email must be royal

[wangi]

Email must be royal since is has two birthdays a year...

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/02/011122 8

clever little hack

[wiredog]

That's how the Times describes it, as a "clever little hack".

But isn't hacking a Bad Thing(TM)?

Fax a Regressive Step

[iCharles]

I read an article a few years ago that postulated that fax was a regressive step. The thesis went something like this:

Back in the 80s (just before faxes became commonplace), America was on the brink of being able to go electronic--using such tools as EDI and other connection mechanisms. Since most of our business was in english (26 letters, 10 numbers, plus miscilanious punctuation)it would happen readily.

The Japanese, however, created cheaper/smaller/better fax machines than were available at the time. Makes perfect sense in that environment, as there are several orders of magnitude more characters to deal with (can't encode as easily).

The cheap and easy fax machine is shipped to the States, and were a hit. They allowed electronic-fast communication without having to significantly change how business was done (signitures could still be in ink, for instance). Further, it was, at the time, cheaper.

Had fax not come along, electronic means would have started to come in earlier. Business adoption of e-mail might have happened sooner, and some things necessary to facilitate business (that still doesn't really exist) such as digital signatures would develope more rapidly.

I submit the fax is still retarding growth. Need something signed--just fax it to me! For that reason, I don't think e-mail will ever completely displace the fax.

Of course, William Gibson wrote in the anthology _Cyberspace_ that no communication technology every dies--it merely finds niche uses.

Re:Fax a Regressive Step

[KjetilK]

Need something signed--just fax it to me! For that reason, I don't think e-mail will ever completely displace the fax.

Yeah, it's really funny. I remember back, well, I guess it is about ten years, I would get some money from my mother, and the way we did this, was that she sent a fax, signed, to her bank, and asked them to transfer a certain amount of money to my account.

No, she didn't.

In reality, she just gave me her oral approval. The fax itself was sent by me, using the home computer, the signature was something I had scanned and attached to the fax when it was submitted.

Well, we were all happy about it, because as I could do it, it saved my mother some work (of course I did it with her approval).

But, the funny thing is, if on a rare occasion I forgot to attach the signature, the fax would be returned, and the transaction would not be committed. But why did they insist on having the signature, the signature was real, OK, but it did not authenticate the origin of the fax. From that perspective, the signature was fake.

People need to realize that the good old signature doesn't mean anything, especially when digitized and transmitted through a fax machine. When that is realized, then we might go over to using digital signatures.

Look out for the ersatz intelligentsia

[Ars-Fartsica]

Here we go with all of the so-called insightful posters extolling the virtues of fax and the uselessness of email.

Well, my office has one thousand machines capable of sending and receiving email and one machine capable of sending and receiving faxes.

How many emails did you send this week? How many faxes?

How many of you give out your fax number to people you meet?

Emails sent daily outnumber faxes by at least a factor of one hundred thousand (conservatively estimating, likely as high as ten million). The conclusion is pretty simple.

Sorry, but FAX is still hulking along...

[Bonker]

Am I insane, or did Email already kill the fax machine? I get about 20 emails a day, and not one fax. btw, F1rst P0st!!! :-)

My God, a relevant FP?!?

Unfortuneately, E-mail has only killed FAX service in the tech sector. If you deal with any other business, FAX is still alive and strong, particularly in financial business.

I work for a financial organization in Texas. We have banks upon banks of fax machines that do nothing but do things like take credit-card applications and ATM account setup instructions.
Despite the fact that encrypted email would be significantly more secure and easier to process than the badly aging FAX protocol, the simple fact of the matter is that many "over 40" business types just don't trust email... in any form. Worse, they're unwilling to learn.

So, instead of having a single application that parses emails for relevant data and then dumps it into our DB, we pay a team of data processing kids to do the same thing, adding another layer of fallibility and error introduction to our system.

Sad, but true.

Re:Sorry, but FAX is still hulking along...

[ergo98]

My SMTP server to your SMTP server. Seriously I have always questioned claims that phone lines are more secure, as phone lines are an easy, static object that anyone with an iota of technical knowledge can hook into (knowing specifically who their victim is) at the local phone junction. Trying to grab someone's packets without controlling their direct ISP is significantly more difficult.

Let me put it another way: There's a business that you want to steal financial information from -> Do you go to the phone line feed on the outside of their building and tap into the wires, or look in their garbage, etc., or do you get an @Home connection and hope they broadcast on your subnet?

I had email in 1994.. through my Sega Genesis

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a peripheal (sp?) called X-Band. It was a video game modem system that allowed you to play against other people. Hmm, kind of like internet gaming. Anyway, you could send mail to the other players to set up an appointment to play (and basically just shoot the breeze). You could also send messages to e-mail addresses. My email address was username@xband.com. Well, my user name was "Mortal Kombat!" with the exclamation mark, and my email address was mortalkombat!@xband.com . Really odd, you can't get a ! in your email address anymore.

So, I've used email for about seven years.

Re:fax will never die... at least not yet.

[the_rev_matt]

>. home users can get broadband for cheap in the form of cable or DSL, these options are not offered to businesses because of the "fear" that the company will use it more than the home user,

Do you know ANYTHING about business connectivity? A few of the companies that offer broadband connectivity specifically for businesses: AT&T, Qwest, SouthwesternBell, Earthlink, UUNet, Verizon, BellSouth, PacBell, DSLi, MegaPath, Sprint, Prodigy, SNet, MSN, Global Crossing, PSINet, XO, Verio, Roadrunner, MediaOne, MPower, and those are just the ones that I can think of off the top of my head. There are many many more regional and local providers, and business users are the ones who have driven the industry (AT&T bought up either Northpoint or Covad (don't recall which) and are dropping the consumer side because the real money is in providing business connectivity.

What a finish for 1971

[bstadil]

Even though we had this Email story before, its interesting that within the same time span of 8 weeks. The first Microprocessor Intel 4004 was born as well as Unix

procmail's birthday

[Corgha]

Tomlinson may think he gets a lot of email, but he doesn't.

Speaking of which, tomorrow (December 7th) will be the 11th anniversary of procmail v1.00, so I decided to look at my procmail log to see how much mail I get. To steal a bit from Mastercard(tm):

[Over the past 90 days,]
Number of mailing lists to which I have been subscribed: 0
Number of messages I've received: 76,697
Bytes of email I've received: 14,517,916,565
Value of procmail: priceless

Actually, procmail is free, so if you don't have it yet, go get it.

Re:EZPass & Email :: The Connection

[TheMatt]

Actually, this is an important theory in Calculus. It's called the Mean Value Theorem. Essentially, if you take one hour to go 80 miles, it can be proven that at some point, your velocity was 80 MPH for an instant.

In fact, there is *always* a homework problem like this in a Calculus I class. Usually, the problem has a student doing this and the teacher asks, "Could you get out of the ticket? No.".

Re:Let's try this again

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen them in Suffolk County, NY East end of the Island