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

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

Hi, how are you?

[mini me]

I send you this message to in order to wish you a Happy Birthday.

<<Happy Birthday.exe>>

E-mail will not kill the fax machine

[Jucius Maximus]

So many employers will accept resume/coverletter packages by fax but not by e-mail. With fax, you get an instant hard copy (because it comes out on paper, unless you're using a software fax prog) and it's much easier to look at the whole package. The employer will often put all the pages in a row on their desk/table/etc and look at them simultaneously. Similarly, unless you print them all out, it's harder to take the PDF to a HR meeting and show it to everyone so they can have a look at the applicant's material. Unless you have a 49" monitor or something, you can't do these things with a PDF file.

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.

Re:E-mail will not kill the fax machine

[odaiwai]

you do know that you can print pdfs?

dave

(login not working)

On the next day...

[ackthpt]

On the next day, Spam probably turns thirty, too.

To: Watson@bell.net
From: Alex@bell.net
Subj: You could be a millionaire next week!

...

clever little hack

[wiredog]

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

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

To celebrate the birthday of email:

[oni]

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.

Re:To celebrate the birthday of email:

[cavemanf16]

You know what the great part about that is? There are numerous automated email tools out there for MS Outlook! Sircam, goner, and Nimbda I think were the names of just some of the more popular, faster ones, IIRC...

where would we be?

[rgf71]

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.

Here's a mirror of the article for non-subscribers

[jodonn]

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."

Re:Spam's Birthday?

[CaptainZapp]

So does this mean that spam turns 30 tomorrow?

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.

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.

fax replacement

[mr.ska]

It'll be a while coming before e-mail can replace faxing. I have yet to see an e-mail system that can faithfully reproduce crappy low-res faxes of drawings and amusing letter-size posters that have been sent around one too many times. E-mail also manages to keep the entire contents of a message, instead of overwriting the top (or bottom) edge with a name and fax number like a fax machine does.

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.

EZPass & Email :: The Connection

[ellem]

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?

Re:EZPass & Email :: The Connection

[dillon_rinker]

The point of speeding on the freeway is that you can drive real fast, pull over at a rest stop, take a leak, stretch out, maybe nap for a few, and arrive at your location refreshed.

Re:EZPass & Email :: The Connection

[zulux]

If I'm going to speed, I'm going to do it right!

I never understood people who speed 20 MPH over on the freeway - you only save 25% of your time. Instead speed 20 MPH in a school zone - you save 50% of your time, and may get a free lube job on the underside of your car if you hit a fat kid.

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

[Ars-Fartsica]

as email is not a reliable means of communications yet.

This is a crock. Don't paint email with the brush of Exchange. Plenty of us use servers that are reliable and clients that don't execute attachments.

Where is the reliablilty of fax? I've stood around the fax machine for hours waiting for my brokers' perenially busy line to open up. Is that progress?

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,

Do you have any idea what you are talking about?

Re:Spam's Birthday?

[Radnor]

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!

http://www.skypoint.com/members/gimonca/usewar.htm l http://www.eff.org/pub/Intellectual_property/Legal /Cases/Canter_Siegel/

Undocumented history

[DaoudaW]

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.

Re:Call for Automated Email Filters

[mgkimsal2]

Procmail is a filter BEFORE email hits your inbox. What you'd want is an actual email client that would 'learn' from what you're doing, not an external 'filter' program. Neat idea, but not the same as another procmail-type filter system.

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.

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

[Lumpy]

Why yes I do have an excellent idea what I am talking about. I dont work with only the ivory towers of the upper echelon that could care less about $10,000 a month in connectivity costs. I'm talking about the machine shop that has max 30 employees, and they are the ones making parts for your cars, aircraft, etc... they cannot afford 1.5K a month for a Frame relay connection. they can barely afford a full time 56K connection so they operate with dial-up to ISP's. Now we have these elitests in corperate america sending their plans to the shop[, as a fricking 50meg power point presentation. Via dial up? no way, fax is the only answer.

please, look at how the other 75% of the business world operates.

...and becoming problematic to handle.

[mwillems]

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