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.
The Fax Machine May Fall Victim to the Advances of E-Mail
By KATIE HAFNER
SK any expert to speculate on the future of e-mail, and you are bound to hear two words: versatility and mobility.
E-mail is already becoming more and more portable. BlackBerry pagers that send and receive e-mail are increasingly standard issue not just for corporate executives but for members of government as well. Cellphones that can exchange short text messages are also becoming common.
In the next few years, it seems the leading potential victim of e-mail may be the fax machine. Those who toil on the technical side of things, developing the software and standards that make the technology appear seamless to its users, foresee a day when e-mail is used routinely for documents that are now faxed. They also predict the complete integration of the In boxes for voice messages, faxes and e-mail.
"One can imagine calling a voice-mail server that has access to your entire e- mail box," with speech-recognition software aiding voice access to e-mail, said Vinton G. Cerf, a founder of the Internet who is now a senior vice president at WorldCom (news/quote). "An e-mail can be `addressed' to a phone number so that it can be `delivered' by phone call," he said.
Such so-called universal messaging systems already exist, but they are not especially easy to use. "It will be another five years or so before that's really attacked seriously," said Dave Crocker, a consultant who works on technical standards for e-mail.
Already, said Walter Ulrich, an early developer of commercial e-mail who is now an entrepreneur and consultant in Houston, "the interlinking of e-mail, information, directories, etc., is so smooth that e- mail almost disappears as a separate function and becomes part of the plumbing."
In five years, he added, e-mail may routine convey full-motion color video with instant click-through to any number of attachments and points of reference. "It will be better than the sci-fi movie `Outland' by a factor of 10," Mr. Ulrich said.
In five years, Dr. Cerf suggested, more than half of all bills will be sent by e-mail, and other advances that are still in the sputtering early stages will be commonplace.
He expects to see people sending e-mail to Internet-enabled appliances, in what he calls "a kind of deferred interaction mode."
In addition, "delivery of large attachments may be by way of pointers to object repositories so that recipients can direct the delivery of the attachment to targets other than the addressee's e-mail box," Dr. Cerf said. "This would allow more flexible manipulation of large attachments by way, for example, of two-way pagers."
At the same time, the sheer volume of e- mail is overwhelming. Dr. Cerf said he had archives of his own e-mail on tape going back to 1971.
"Some historian is going to have fun going through a fur ball of e-mail someday," he said.
Peter J. Denning, a professor of computer science at George Mason University, said In boxes have reached the point where 90 percent of the incoming mail is immediately disposed of.
Though better filters will help, he said, "we will need radically different practices of time management to cope, or else we'll give up on e-mail entirely."
I send you this mail in order to celebrate you turning 30:
HAVE YOU HEARD OF GROWTH HORMONE (GH)???
Released by your own pituitary gland, GH starts declining in
your 20s, even more in your 30s and 40s, eventually resulting
in the shrinkage of major organs plus all other symptoms related
to old age.
THIS CAN NOW BE REVERSED!!! IN THOUSANDS OF CLINICAL STUDIES,
GH HAS BEEN SHOWN TO ACCOMPLISH THE FOLLOWING:
in 6 months of usage !!!
For MORE INFORMATION and your FREE INFO-PAK,
Call 24 hrs. (recorded message):
1 800 COWBOY NEAL
SALES REPS NEEDED (NOT MLM)
____________________________
If you are not interest in this offer, you will be
automatically removed from out mailing list by sending
an email to yourself
why has this turned into a FAX machine discussion?
Get your Unix fortune now!