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.
Do you sell cheese here? Thank you.
Oh, first post too, mofo.
Si Hoc Legere Scis, Nimium Eruditionis Habes.
Dammit you beat me to it.
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!!! :-)
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Will someone please mirror this; I don't want to make an account at the NY times...
I wonder when someone's going to announce the anniversary of the first Spam email?
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/02/011122 8
Personal email is getting so bad now with all the spam. Don't even think about using a free webmail service either. The only reason I have a hotmail account is so I can use Messenger. PLEASE STOP THE SPAM!
I send you this message to in order to wish you a Happy Birthday.
<<Happy Birthday.exe>>
What are you waiting for???
Furthermore, sorting applicants can be simpler because you don't have to worry about setting up some sort of filename scheme and then make a whole directory structure for the prospects, rejecects, etc.
please shutup and return to filching. This article is not even worth me trolling.
First, there was a plan: how to bring together the different development groups at work? My boss said there was a sort of tension he thought could be eased by some social interaction. Not easy. Almost all of the different development groups despised each other, each thinking its "art" was more important and eloquent than the others'.
There was the kernel extension developer group, coding mostly in C and some PowerPC and x86 assembler. They worked on making our PCI board work with Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, QNX, and Solaris. They worked "special hours," coming in at one and staying late, supposedly, until seven or eight at night. They enjoyed Jizz cola and had a penchant for ThinkGeek t-shirts and cracking jokes about Win32 API calls and the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.
We had XML developers too. They worked on our website, documentation formatting, and simple apps to configure the driver software. They used HTML, XSL, JavaScript, and a bit of Java. They typically dressed casually, drank coffee and tea, and liked to work straight from the spec: no "Learn XSL in 30 Days" books were to be found in their cubicle farm.
Then we had the guys who wrote full-out UNIX apps. These guys and the products they wrote had been acquired from another company, and were the source of most of the tension: they'd never really been integrated into our group except that they were physically present with the rest of us. They all had beards or mullets or long, unwashed hair. Many wore suspenders or the afore-mentioned ThinkGeek clothes; some even had Penguin tatooes or small C app code tattooed on them. Their cubicle farm was known for the bleating laughter that exploded when one of them found a "silly" bug on someone else's code, and for the rotten, fetid stench that could only be compared to three-day-old shit reeking from inside a rotting corpse's abdominal cavity.
So, in order to get the guys to "know each other" my boss had asked me to organize a during-hours, alcohol-friendly party. My ideas ranged from a keg or two to live entertainment, AKA strippers. But as to what to get them to actually talk to each other in a human manner I had no clue. So I let it go til the last minute and decided to let my inherent creativity mull it over in the back of my head.
When the day of the party had arrived, the catering company brought in a few trays of lunch meat, chicken, pizza, and side dishes, I had picked up the kegs (all four) from the local brewery, and the big-screen TV and DVD were set up ready to blast the Matrix into the eyes and ears of my co-workers. The eagerness in the the air was encouraging and I thought that loosening up and smiles going on even now were a good sign. I even saw some of the guys who'd known each other previously begin to bunch up, bringing along the co-workers they knew from everyday work.
The first thing everyone did was hit the food line, loading up their plates and grabbing a cup for beer to wash it down with. A few approached me and thanked me for the food; it seems appeasing the belly really did tame the beast. After a few minutes of silence and eating and a few second and third courses, they guys were ready to sit down and be entertained. After asking if anyone needed anything else before the movie started, the lights went out and the Matrix began playing. I heard a few enthusiastic comments and jokes being told.
About half-way through the movie I noticed a lot of the guys, especially from the UNIX app group, were getting up and presumably going to the restroom. No suprise, as the second keg was history by now and the third was probably half-way gone. I also noticed some of the guys bumping into things and stumbling. Alcohol's the social lubricant, eh? Well, not long after, my bladder beckoned and I answered. As I made my way to the restroom, I had a self-satisfied smile on my face: my little plan was working, my boss would be happy, and it might even a Christmas bonus or a promotion (even if in title only).
Well, as soon as I pushed the restroom door open, I knew something was wrong. The smell of vomit was pretty strong and I hoped that it'd only been the work of one guy. But the smell was so pungent! After standing at the urinal, waiting for the golden flow to commence, I stood in silence. It was then that I heard grunting. Listening intently for a few seconds, I hoped whoever was upchucking their beer and munchies wasn't leaving a huge mess for the cleanup crew. After pissing and still hearing the noise, I approached the stall the that moaning was coming from.
"Hey, you alright in there, man?" I asked cautiously.
I was met by silence for a moment. Then I heard a few grunts and concealed giggles. Something was up in there. It was then that I heard what sounded like crying and more moaning. What the fuck? I decided I needed to see what was going on. I didn't want this party to come crashing down around my ears. I pushed the door open hard and then gasped as I saw the most sordid, disgusting thing I'd ever seen in my life.
Standing on either side of the toilet were two if the UNIX app coders, their beards caked with vomit, their pants in puddles around ankles, with erect penises wagging in the air. Doubled over the toilet, his head nearly dunked in the swill, was one of the XML developers. His pants were also around his ankles and what appeared to be a combination of blood and semen were dripping from his torn, ragged anus. He was covered in vomit from head to toe, and he was crying hard into the toilet bowl, its echo an eerie accompaniment to the awful scene I was seeing but not believing.
They two Linux coders slowly turned and looked me straight in the eye, evil grins smeared across both of their bearded faces.
"What in Fuck's name are you doing!?" was all I could force out of my mouth. I still wasn't believing I was seeing this.
Saying nothing, both of the Linux coders rushed me. Being in such a tense state, I threw both of them off and made a break for the door. And the fucking thing wouldn't open. In the follow two seconds that seemed like an eternity, the door was pushed open my way and two more Linux coders came in. Upon seeing what was happening, they immediately grabbed me and were joined by the first two. I was trapped. Then the one guy, who was a dead-ringer for Rasputin, the mad Russian monk, gazed into my eyes and said in a feminine voice, "Looks like Mr. Party is gonna get a taste of the real action!" and cackled insanely.
Cold sweat spurted from the pores on my foreheads and cheeks as I was dragged by the four stinking, polluted hippies into the same stall their previous victim was in. Rasputin spoke again, excitement in his voice.
"Thanks for the pizza and beer, now it's time for the weeners and buns!"
Immediately the first two slogged their pants off and got down on their knees. The other two put there knees in my back and held me on top of the first victim, who now appeared to be unconscious. I heard their belts coming off and their zippers coming down, and some rustling around told me that their pants were coming down also. Then the first two started sucking off the other two, in what I could only call the most enthusiastic blowjobs I'd ever seen in my life. The moaning and slurping sounds turned my stomach and I retched. I could see why the first guy might have vomited.
Eventually Rasputin and his cohort started moaning more loudly, and one of them said "fifteen seconds." This was followed by a series of rapid-fire belching and burping that shook me up and down on the guy underneath me. After about fifteen seconds, all Hell broke loose. The two guys behind me started vomiting on the two guys fellating them and I saw cumshot shoot and mix with the vomit all over the two cocksuckers' faces. It was then that I almost lost. I finally did refund when the first two vile fluids were followed by streams of piss. I heard swallowing and dripping and I yacked all over their first victim's head.
Rasputin cried out like a little girl in ecstasy. "Oh god, I'd been waiting for that all night! This party fuckin' roxorz my coxor!"
Now it was my turn, it seemed, as all four started tearing my pants down. Chunks of vomit-piss-semen fell on my back and soaked through my t-shirt. It was reviling. I shuddered as I felt their cold, clammy hands in my ass-crack and a very indelicate reacharound on my ball-sack. At this point I had no idea who was doing what, and I was just praying that I'd wake up and realize I was drunk and dreaming a la nightmare.
Just then I heard the door boom open and my boss's voice fill the air. The stall door was open and he saw right away the turgid scene transpiring in front of him. His voice was immediately followed by two others, XML developers I knew, and they flew into the stall as best they could and began a fight to save my asshole. The poor guy underneath me had just woken up and started struggling and the extra weight of eight other bodies in the stall must have been suffocating.
"It'll be all right, buddy," I offered to him.
Within thirty seconds I was to my feet and was delivering the most heart-felt kicks to the guts of the rapist faggot Linux coders. Between me, my boss, and the two XML developers, we had the gang of four knocked out in a sloppy, excrement-filled pile of hairy body.
It's now been a month since this horrible incident and I am in regular therapy with a sexual abuse counselor. In response to the terrible outcome of this party, my boss toyed with the idea of selling the group off to another company, sans the four hippies who'd been fired and arrested. After considerable urging on my part, and very open ear from my boss, the whole group was dissolved and the Linux coders lost their jobs. Their product was delayed by a year as my boss began hiring a new development team. We'd found evidence that the whole group had been involved in the planning of the gang- bangs and that had it not been for us everyone would have had a "turn" in the stalls.
If there's one thing we learned from this tragedy is that Linux coders, users, and advocates are desperate cock-lusting homosexual faggots that can't be trusted in any situation, let alone a restroom setting. You've been warned.
On the positive side, though, the whole incident brought solidarity between the other groups in the company and I am now on schedule to get a huge Christmas package that not only includes a gigantic bonus but a month's worth of paid time off and a real promotion.
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
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."
But isn't hacking a Bad Thing(TM)?
Best Slashdot Co
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.
It wasn't an accidental invention, exactly, but it was certainly one that followed an unexpected trajectory to glory.
Thirty years ago, give or take a month or two, Ray Tomlinson, an unassuming computer scientist at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, an engineering firm in Cambridge, Mass., sat down at his computer and wrote a relatively simple computer program that enabled electronic messages to travel from one computer to another.
Since then, e-mail has become such a fixture in so many people's lives, it is hard to imagine life without it. According to the International Data Corporation, some 9.8 billion electronic messages are sent each day. E-mail is a communications mainstay of businesses. It is the glue that keeps far-flung families together. Romantic relationships find both outlet and solace in it.
In some ways, observed Nico Macdonald, a principal of Spy, a London-based research firm, e-mail has become the ultimate medium through which humans use computers -- to organize discussion groups, deliver news stories, confirm purchases, signal updates to Web pages or play chess. Or as he put it in the language of the Internet age, "E-mail has become an entire personal information environment."
Those are just the obvious aspects of life with e-mail.
In dozen of other, less obvious ways, e-mail has profoundly changed the way people communicate, as its unique properties have let it settle into a place all its own among forms of human interaction.
E-mail's inventors weren't necessarily thinking about the medium's less evident advantages -- that it makes time- zone problems evaporate, or that it can be the virtual sherpa for transporting documents, photos and video clips. Yet those are the benefits that continue to propel its use upward, with the number of users worldwide estimated in the hundreds of millions.
Then there are the perils. What you post to a mailing list may show up in Internet archives many years later. A finger glancing off the wrong key could catapult a message into cyberspace prematurely or send it to the wrong address. More ominously, opening a booby-trapped message can make you both a victim and an unwitting carrier of a computer virus conceived by a malicious code writer.
And almost from the start, e-mail was something to hide behind.
David Walden, an engineer who worked at Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) with Mr. Tomlinson in the 1970's, recalled a turning point of sorts for him. "I remember when I realized that I could apologize in writing for a problem and thus make the situation better," he said, "and the person I was working with couldn't see me and thus couldn't read my body language, that I didn't' really feel contrite," he said.
E-mail is also a snapshot of one's mood from day to day, or even hour to hour.
"One of my kids saves e-mail for a year then sends it back to you as a kind of flashback to the past," said Vinton G. Cerf, a founder of the Internet and a senior vice president at WorldCom (news/quote), the communications services company. "You would not do that with paper mail but it is easy with digital, electronic stuff."
With all those uses, the sheer volume of e- mail has, in fact, become overwhelming. It seems clear that like other technologies before it, e-mail has not simply replaced a way of doing things; it has created its own demand. In-boxes are increasingly filled not just with spam from strangers and well- meant but unwelcome humor from friends, but with single-sentence requests from higher-ups that translate to hours of extra work, and mile-long attachments from colleagues that must be read, and now.
Yet people live with it because, by now, they cannot live without it.
Mr. Tomlinson's clever little hack was not the very beginning of e-mail. It already existed in the 1960's, when computer scientists sent e-mail within time-sharing systems -- one computer with multiple terminals.
But Mr. Tomlinson, who is now a principal engineer at BBN Technologies, was the one who made it possible to send e-mail from one machine to another over a computer network. While he was well known for his programs, he became better known for a simple decision he made while writing them.
He needed a way to denote the separation between the name of the user from the name of the machine the user was on. His eye lighted on the @ symbol. Unaware that he was creating an icon for the wired world, that is what he chose. And equally unaware that his first message would someday be the object of historical scrutiny, Mr. Tomlinson said he made no mental note of what he first tapped out on the keyboard.
Through the 1970's, the use of network mail, as it was called back then, grew not exponentially, but as gradually as the Internet itself. The Internet started as a tool for research into computer networks, and e- mail was its counterpart to the interoffice memo. In fact, correspondence over the government-sponsored Internet, and its forerunner, the Arpanet, was to be restricted to official network business.
But from the start, people knew how to use e-mail in the name of distraction. One of the first network mailing lists, called SF- Lovers, was devoted to science fiction fans. The network's users, typically graduate students, began turning to e-mail to play games, exchange gossip, carry on relationships, carry out drug deals or circulate "Impeach Nixon" appeals.
With activities like those, not to mention the passion that can accompany scholarship, e-mail was not a sedate medium for long. Mr. Walden remembers seeing the first e-mail-based vituperation, later known as flaming, sometime in the mid-1970's.
"It was a really nasty flame from someone at M.I.T., and we complained to his boss that civility was still in order, even by e- mail," Mr. Walden said. "Of course, it was only a short time before flaming had a name and it wasn't worth bothering to try to stop it."
By the early 1970's, three-quarters of all traffic on the Arpanet was e-mail. And as the medium grew, some turned their attention to making it more practical. For example, sending e-mail was simple, but trying to read or respond to it was a huge annoyance. Text poured onto the screen in a stream, with nothing separating one incoming message from another. And there was no reply function.
Lawrence Roberts, who was then a manager at the Advanced Research Projects Agency's Information Processing Techniques Office, solved that problem after his boss began complaining about the volume of e-mail piling up in his In box. In 1972, Dr. Roberts produced the first e-mail manager, called RD, which included a filing system, as well as a Delete function.
Further improvements to network mail were made by John Vittal, who in the 1970's was a young programmer at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. Mr. Vittal spent many hours working on the program, which he called MSG, in his spare time. It included not just a Delete command but also an Answer feature, enabling a recipient to reply to a message easily. His program eventually became the de facto standard of the Arpanet.
More and more, the functionality of e- mail took on features of conventional correspondence. Two of Mr. Vittal's creations were the cc and bcc features -- appellations whose origins, in the carbon paper that smudged many a copy, now seem part of prehistory.
"There was a feeling that for user understandability we had to mimic traditional written forms of communication -- office memos, letters, post cards," Mr. Vittal said. "Drawing parallels helped people understand what they could do."
E-mail's wider potential did not go unnoticed. The General Accounting Office predicted in 1981 that electronic mail would sharply reduce the volume of conventional mail and would cut postal employment by two-thirds by 2000. (Its foresight was a bit blurred: e-mail and other competition notwithstanding, the volume of letters doubled in the last two decades, and the postal work force grew by 20 percent.)
As the use of computers in offices grew, various commercial e-mail services, none connected directly to the Internet, indeed cropped up. But all of them failed.
MCI Mail, developed in the early 1980's by MCI, the telecommunications company that is now part of WorldCom, was one very visible attempt to introduce e-mail to the business world. An elaborate, feature-rich service, MCI Mail was well ahead of its time. Not only could users send electronic messages of up to 500 characters for 45 cents, but for an additional charge they could also have MCI print and send those messages through the postal system or by courier.
The world was so unaccustomed to electronic mailboxes that MCI Mail included an alerting service by which MCI employees called recipients by telephone to tell them to check their electronic mail.
Yet MCI Mail, introduced in 1983, did not catch on. Nor did the Postal Service succeed with its version -- E-Com, for Electronic Computer-Originated Mail, introduced in 1982 and abandoned in 1985.
"It was a very, very tough sell in the business world," said Dr. Cerf, a co-developer of MCI Mail. "The question was always, `What's e-mail, and why do I need it?' But it was like being the first on your block to have a telephone -- `Well, who am I going to call?' "
But finally, with the advent of the World Wide Web and the opening of the Internet to commercial traffic, the network itself became widely accessible to the public at large in the mid-1990's. By then, online services were routinely providing home users with an Internet-based e-mail account. And not coincidentally, that was the period when America Online, most spectacularly, begin to take off.
By 1996, 300 million pieces of e-mail were sent on the average day, and roughly 100 million people worldwide were using the medium, according to estimates by the International Data Corporation.
Yet for all that has been done to make e- mail -- like the telephone or the television -- a tool of the masses, it has always suffered from what might be described as technocentrism.
Mr. Walden told the story of trying to set up e-mail for his 87-year-old mother, who has Parkinson's disease. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Mr. Walden said, he helped her through the AOL software. "I told her what to do as she slowly moved the mouse and struggled with not being able to double- click fast enough," he said. He showed her how to type a message, with many characters typed twice because she couldn't remove her fingers from the keys quickly.
"E-mail still comes out of the culture of the computer technologist and the assumption that people want and will deal with lots of little buttons, windows and message boxes," Mr. Walden said.
Actually, Mr. Walden pointed out, more primitive systems from the early 1970's like Dr. Roberts's RD program or Mr. Vittal's MSG might be easier for people like his mother to use.
Moreover, Mr. Walden said, the more useful and ubiquitous e-mail becomes, the more susceptible it is to the viruses and worms that circulate with alarming regularity through cyberspace.
Still, all the viruses and spam combined will not stop e-mail from remaining, at its core, a tool for one of the most basic of human tendencies -- the desire to be in touch.
Dr. Cerf said he occasionally received grateful messages from people who met over the Internet, courted via e-mail and are now married.
"I hope they stay together because I don't want to get blamed if they don't," Dr. Cerf said. "The one thing you learn is not to take too much credit because at some point you might have to take a lot of blame."
Fax machines are weak, decrepit devices that email should have abolished years ago, but, because of managerial dim-wittedness and fear of change, they are sure to be around for years.
also, Michael, you seem really bitter these days... whats up with that?
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
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...
Name one. I defy you.
Similarly, unless you print them all out, it's harder to take the PDF to a HR meeting
Thats why you insist on or convert it to ASCII. when was the last time anyone sent their resume as a PDF?
Asking for a mirror to an article not only mods you offtopic for some reason, but gets you flames from people who think you can just willy nilly register for all sorts of sites.
I have 3656.9 Bogomips. How many Bogomips do you have?
Happy Birthday, to me! 22 doesn't seem as exciting as last year. Well, from what I remember of last year anyway...
Um, this is my sig.
Philadelphia, PA - In news that is sure to excite the Linux community, long time Linux developer Todd Stanton got laid.
"I still have trouble believing it myself," said Todd. "I was doing some coding when my power supply blew. Instead of pulling out the spare like I usually would, I decided to head down to Best Buy to check out the new DVD releases. Nothing new was out, so I bought another copy of 'The Matrix' since the one I had was pretty worn out. Turns out the checkout girl was a Matrix fan too and well one thing led to another."
Word spread rapidly on message boards and on IRC. "It's pretty irresponsible of him and shows his lack of dedication to Linux and the open source movement," said Fred Simpson. "If others try to emulate this behavior then a lot of projects could get derailed."
Others like Gary Wilcox were glad to hear the news, "We're tired of all those Microsoft developers shoving their Win-Ho's in our face. Now we can tell them about Todd. Who's laughing now?"
Some developers are also excited that this may increase their chances of getting lucky, but most are being realistic. Walker Crandall said, "We thought we'd all be doing the hokey-pokey after Bill Fitzsimmons got some during the LinuxWorld Conference in 1999. We were fooling ourselves. Nobody got nothing."
This is the third such occurrence for Linux developers since 1991.
- Marco
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.
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.
Before email all the spam used to be by s-mail, telex and fax. Now we are free from spam. Thank you email for been there!!
(Happy "double" 30th years)
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
we just have he new breed of color fax machines coming out, and you would be suprised how many faxes we get from clients as email is not a reliable means of communications yet. (the use of exchange servers here at work is a testament to that) If I send a fax of a large document to a client I know that it was sent and actually arrived at the other end, spit out as paper before the fax machine hangs up the phone.
besides, not all companies have happily embraced broadband in the offices. 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, so a company get's stuck with paying thousands per month for broadband access in order to download those 1meg word files and 10 meg Power point presentations.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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I was at my chiropractor the other day, she was asking me about problems with her computer. It seems she got some virus or something.
She said between the virus problems and spam, she was seriously thinking of getting rid of internet access. It was becoming more of a pain than benefit. Of course she runs windows.
I discard any mail from hotmail as spam. I use anything other than ms software to protect against virii. Is there a trend here?
Derek
Why isn't there more email-enabled mini-gadgets?
:)
I want a box that can replace my fax machine, where i in addition to 'enter recipients phone #', also have the oppurtunity to enter recipients email.
Vice-versa, give my fax a email-address and let it print out stuff people emails it!
But please, please do it in a smart way, I don't want a 4-hour setup nightmare or a dos'ed fax machine
Are we getting there? when?
lazy cheap bastard.
The fact that it's a long established standard that has evolved little since its beginnings has unfortunately brought some major drawbacks:
- look at all the troubles with exotic and multichar encodings: de facto this reducees mail to the least common encoding.
- the fact that it's basically absolutely uncrypted, and that the only secure way to send an encrypted message is by shouting out loud "hey look, my message is PGP/GPG encrypted" which makes you instantly suspicious
- the fact that most people think it's too much of a hassle to send/receive an encrypted message: de facto most people don't, mainly because it's not integrated.
so the trouble is: since there was no single standard adopted by all mail clients/servers to add crypto and multichar capabilities, most people don't use them and this is a trouble for the others too.
Is CmdrTaco a homosexual?
(a) Yes
(b) No
(c) He must first obtain a sexual organ to have a sexual preference.
- Marco
why has this turned into a FAX machine discussion?
Get your Unix fortune now!
... like Spam has been around a lot longer?
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
Tomlinson may think he gets a lot of email, but he doesn't.
Michael may think he's clever, insightful, and not a giant prick, but he is.
Eventually everyone will send their faxes through the internet (email, direct upload, etc) using simple PC interfaces or dedicated devices that look just like today's fax machines. Recipients will have software that gets the "fax" so they can view and print it. (See jfax/efax for an example today.) These things will still be called "fax"es.
These things will not be called email ever even though the underlying communication mechanism might well be that.
Fax machines that use voice lines will die. Fax machines will not.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
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.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
anybody remember Anne Tomlinson?? The (imaginary??) girl that caused big problems with slashdot a few months back?? Wonder if there's any relation... >=)
I think it is...
read here: that story was already submitted months ago.
or i miss 100% the point...
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
My father worked at IBM for 27 years, starting in the mid 50's. I am pretty sure that IBM had internal email before this all-hallowed Internet-centric blather is reporting to be the case.
IBM had it's own huge network for messaging and internal communications, including their own satellites, in the 60's.
Let's be real here and stop trying to revise history so the 'good guys' (you know, those 'internet pioneers' all the script kiddies and various 'hackers' worship) don't automatically win all contests.
- Emails can be classified under any number of keywords. The user can selectively view the messages under any keyword.
- Each keyword is associated with a policy that specifies importance and expiration (when the message is to be deleted and whether the user needs to confirm a deletion).
- The system (after learning from watching the user) will suggest categories for incoming email.
Any systems like this out there. Any systems that would be relatively easier to modify to include these features.A few years back EZPass was introduced to NY. It took a while to catch on but now it is everywhere you can even get McDonald's with the damn thing. Two or three years ago someone figured out that a car on a toll road like a thruway could be tracked. Further they figured out, through the tracking, that cars weren't doing the speed limit and began issuing tickets based on time from point A to point B. The thought process being if you got there in this amount of time you averaged 85 MPH and if that was your average you were definitely going faster than that factoring accelerating and decelerating at the tolls so here's a ticket for 85 MPH; consider yourself lucky b/c we KNOW you were going faster than that.
The creator of EZPass complained loudly that this was not what he invented EZPass for, "I wanted to make people's drives easier! This is a gross misuse of the EZPass system."
NY State told him to shut up and poked him with a sharpened spork or something.
anylou...
I wonder if Tomlinson feels the same every time he gets spammed from www.asiananaldogrape.com or a script kiddie sends out some Outlook virus?
This
Under the rain of a thousand flames!
I must burn in hell, suffer and pay for my sins
But Gods the one who's losing, Satan always wins!
why was she fired on the spot when
failing to reconnect slashdot to the
world some time ago ?
Besides, it seems to me that @ was slow to catch
up : I remember addresses with ! ! ! !
and BITNET addresses with %.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
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.
LOSE WEIGHT FAST!
6 c%69%62%6c%65
DOUBLE YOUR MONEY!
CUM AND SEE MY TEEN DREEM...
THIS IS NOT SPAM.
OVER 4 MILLION E-MAIL ADDRESSES!
and my favourite, first supported in Outlook,
CLICK HERE!
Or as my sigfile puts it:
TOP 50 l33t 0-DaY wArEz!!! http://3640001799/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=%67%75%6c%
1up.org
Thirty years ago, give or take a month or two, Ray Tomlinson, an unassuming computer
Sometime in late 1971, a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail message. "I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other," he recalls now. "The test messages were entirely forgettable. . . . Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP or something similar." Read more...
The great thing about the history of the Internet is the cluelessness of many of the participants. Tomlinson really didn't have any idea of the significance of his hack. He was too busy getting two computers to talk to each other to go into any futurist fantasies.
The real and interesting history of email happened in the '80s with BITnet for academic-types and then of course the huge commercial success of compuserve. Even then it wasn't until the blooming of the WWW in the '90s that email came into the consciousness of the general public.
who invented Reply to All?
Email can't be 30. AOL wasn't even founded until 1985!
"Love is never saying you're too proud." -Tonic
when was microsoft allowed to destroy email by removing the bounce command?
Although they no longer offer the service, a former employee has set up a website there. Basically, information on where the Employees that worked on Xband have moved on to.
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
Help fight continental drift.
Don't want to subscribe? Just use the following:
username: slashdot_nyt
password: slashdot
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.
..
Actually the real question is:
Hpow many Unique Business realated fax's do you get? how many Unique Business related eMails to you get?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I have a client who still sends me faxes with corrections... Should I be worried ? Yes, possibly ...
"Timber ! ............"
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
My ass has not even turned 30 yet.
How can an article about the 30th birthday of email not mention Eric Allman?????
If trends hold, my number of junk faxes may meet the number of spam e-mail's in about two years. The question is who taught who?
What OS do you want to abuse today?
I've traveled the length of the NYS Thruway I90 portion countless times and never have I been able to use my EZ-Pass at a drive-thru. I still have to pull out my Mobil SpeedPass for gas too.
Who says the East Coast is not on the cutting edge of new technology technology? One of the best people I ever hired gave me his first resume written in pencil on paper. M$, be not proud.
A Word formated document from a programer is evidence of wasted resources. All it proves is they:
1. Spent time and money at a copy shop. Bowed to reality, working for the devil but not very hard.
2. Are wasting enough disk space for M$ Office. Lazy or stupidly unethical, it's either OEM or they got some LEET cracked trash from Cairo.
3. Have figured out how to install Star Office or some other program that has micros~.DOC format. Oh yeah, they also keep it up to date, AHHHH!
Send me a link, send me HTML, or just send me text (prefered) thank you. Fax, well OK, if you must. Word, PowerPoint and other useless chrome will be sent to /dev/null.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Did you ever see this as an animated movie form in Calc class? The one I saw was made in the 1970s, I think. It was meant to be kind of hokey. There aren't a lot of things I remember about Calc class. This one one of them. Well, that and the fact that we got to watch movies like "Blazing Saddles" for the remainder of the school year after the AP Math tests in May.
Oh, I just remembered the one about the painter who got hired to paint the outside of a geometrical structure that had infinite surface area because of an asymptote near y=0. I think he went broke at the end.
--
dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
And 30 years later, I'm getting more spam than ever!
The Karma Cap(TM) is a heavy cast iron pot that is placed over the head of any slashdot user whose karma hits 50. This prevents the user from racking up any more karma (even if the user can touch-type).
It seems to me (CTO of a small multinational company) that we are approaching an email watershed. Let me rehash what may be the obvious, to see if anyone has any ideas.
Up to now it was a matter of getting MORE communicative - "more email is more good". Email started as a mail replacement, but became a telephone replacement. We are now surpised (even annoyed) if an email does not elicit a response in 5 minutes.
I see two reasons why this is changing.
One is a relatively small challence, but annoying nonetheless: SPAM. I get 100 a day now - it is becoming a real challenge to handle. I and will have to change email addresses soon - but with hundreds of real people having my address, this is not easy. We need to see this as a real problem for the first time - tools (filters, "organise" etc) are no longer sufficient.
The second problem is more fundamental still. I get 100 "real" emails a day too - but this drives me towards a purely reactive work model. I have too little time for writing back to them all - let alone for the strategising I am being paid for. I need to do LESS communicating - and with me, many of my colleagues.
I am looking forward to seeing what ideas we come up with to take this to the next level. I know it's not XP and Outlook 2003!
Mike
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
how can email turn 30 twice, there was a previous article, Happy Birthday! Email Is 30 Years Old by timothy with 383 comments on Monday October 01, @08:39PM
/.
get with the friggin program
My EZPass works perfectly fine in the tollbooths. I have yet to see McD's post a sign saying "Use EZ-Pass here."
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.
Having problems posting this, cause IE decided backspace is now alt-
Anyhow. Anyone recall reading the DoS attack for faxes? I think it was cDc that posted it...
You get a few sheets of paper, tape them together end to end, fax somebody, and tape the ends together. On and on it goes...
I'm wondering how many faxes have built-in DoS detection... I'm betting not many...
IF however, MS had built a fax machine, we'd be able to send it a page with some script in it to send to cause the fax to send those pages to all the numbers in it's memory....
Mmm.
When I look at it like that, MS hits new lows..
Why not have a fax server? Incoming faxes are digitally stored & manipulated. Much easier to manage and hardcopy is still easy to generate. The people on the other end are none the wiser.
We use to do this with our network of NeXT computers.
"Then again I've never understood printing out anything for reading. I prefer reading on screen."
Same reason E-books haven't taken over.
Why not have a fax server? Incoming faxes are digitally stored & manipulated. Much easier to manage and hardcopy is still easy to generate. The people on the other end are none the wiser.
Originally, we did have a fax server, but it was scrapped in favor of mulitple fax lines for management reasons... read: management thinks they understand the fax machines, but can't grasp the fax server, even when it plunks faxes in their Outlook inbox. The justification was 'cost of operation'. Yeah, sure. Whatever.
Even with a fax server, however, the data still has to go between an image format and Ascii to fit inside the DB. Frankly, I trust OCR software more than data entry, but results may vary...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
"Actually, Mr. Walden pointed out, more primitive systems from the early 1970's like Dr. Roberts's RD program or Mr. Vittal's MSG might be easier for people like his mother to use. "
So, finally the command-line does have an advantage over the GUI!.
"The one thing you learn is not to take too much credit because at some point you might have to take a lot of blame."
I nominate this quote of the week.
I've worked in sofware industry for 2,5 years and in this time I have sent one (1) fax in total. I have no idea how many thousands of emails I have sent..
As far as I'm conserned FAX is allready dead. Maybe this is a cultural thing and in US people use fax more, who knows..
"There is a terrorist behind every bush"
After having just setup our virtual domain/virtual accounts/imap over ssl and smtp over ssl with courier's imapd and exim , I keep getting the nagging feeling that none of it is really thought through ...
... try to do something with that script lang of theirs ... ie.
} }}{1}{0}}"
... still not easy ...
... :)
... Our own pam module, we wrote..)
... when do the good folks at Debian intend to pronounce it stable? After another 1.5 years? [/rant]
:)
Which brings me to another thing, has anyone tried Courier's MTA ? Is it any good? I'm not so convinced exim's the best possible choice anymore,
I mean
server_condition = "${if and {{!eq{$2}{}}{!eq{$3}{}} \
{crypteq{$3}{${extract{2}{:} \ {${lookup{$2}lsearch{/etc/passwd}{$value}{*:*}}}}
Look ma! Reverse Polish Notation! No son that's just an insane amount of brackets put there to clarify things...
Ok, so it's easier than sendmail, so what
Oh yeah, good luck trying to get your imap/pop/smtp deamons to authenticate virtual useraccounts from the same source
(Murder, she wrote
[slightly off-topic]
Wow, I'm on a roll here, so I'll share some more fun experiences.
Server that we cooked up this soup on is running Woody, because the exim in Potato can't do ssmtp.
Ok, so , after finally getting this to work, we note that apt-get update wrecked everthing because our dear maintainer of the courier packages decided that no more shall we support direct usage of authentication modules , Nay! From now on forth authentication shall be done through yonder authdaemon! Add to that the fact that this little update mishap happends five minutes before I'm about to go home, so I happily stays another hour and a half figuring out why the hell our imap service authenticates users no more....
[rant]
Ok, I know, "Woody is an unstable distr. Don't use it in production systems"... Unstable
[/slightly off-topic]
Miqlo's $0.02 , I'll be wanting it back soon.
Unless he got a fake ID when he was a kid, Email looks to be older than 30:i l.jpg.html
http://www.attrition.org/gallery/computing/tn/ema
I would have posted this earlier, but attrition.org was filtered from work by WebNot.