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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.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/02/011122 8
I send you this message to in order to wish you a Happy Birthday.
<<Happy Birthday.exe>>
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.
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
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.
No : mail is far from killing the fax, especially on a juridical point of view:
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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."
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
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...
With NY Times articles, all you have to do is sub www.nytimes... with archives.nytimes...
------
Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
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.
whatever happened th channel.nytimes ? That used to be the sweetest link since it had no ads. Has it been nixed? moved?
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
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.
... like Spam has been around a lot longer?
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
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.
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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
- 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
user: slash2001
pw: slash2001
Here's some links for information on that legendary spam. I remember sitting down to read my newsgroups that day and seeing this message in _every_ newsgroup I subscribed to. It was strange to see such a thing back then!
m l
http://www.eff.org/pub/Intellectual_property/Legal /Cases/Canter_Siegel/
http://www.skypoint.com/members/gimonca/usewar.ht
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.
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.
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'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.
And 30 years later, I'm getting more spam than ever!
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:>
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.
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!