How The Postman Almost Owned E-Mail

Thrawn writes "'Imagine that the U.S. Postal Service was in charge of e-mail. Sound absurd? It does to most people until they realize that it almost happened.' " I think the chance of it actually happening are massively overstated in this article, but it's still an interesting "What If". But about as likely, as say, The Confederacy ^? winning the US Civil War ^? .

Comments

Owned Email? No. First Hotmail.

[peterdaly]

From this information, the post office never even came close to "owning" email. They considered offering it as a service.

A much better analogy is:
"What if the Postman owned the first hotmail"
Tons of variations which are closer to reality exist, but hotmail sums it all up in a sentence everyone would understand.

The word "owned" is very misleading, and not supported in the article. They almost owned email as much as they own package delivery today. (Think UPS and FedEx)

-Pete

not a bad idea, IMHO

[esarjeant]

Given the volatility of the ISP market, a national email infrastructure would have been a wonderful thing. You could maintain a permanent email with the US Post Office and not have to worry about what might happen to your address if your service provider should change.

Imagine not having to worry about @mediaone.com suddenly not working for you. Just about every major provider has undergone a substantial shift in how they process emails, resulting in everything from new domain names to new mail accounts. I can't tell you how many people I can no longer find @compuserve.com.

Poor Slashdot Analogy

[chazzf]

I don't like to accuse people of out hand, but the Confederacy winning the Civil War was a fairly likely thing for the first few years. Most Union generals (McClellan, Banks, Burnside) measured up very poorly against their Confederate counterparts (Lee, Jackson, Johnston).

Had the south won the Battle of Antietam in 1862, as it almost did, the war would have likely ended. Even as late as 1864 Lincoln was in serious electoral trouble until Grant finally delivered. Had McClellan won, he would have pursued peace.

I can excuse spelling mistakes, but as a historian I am appalled at the ignorance of the editors.

~Chazzf

The US Government DID build the email system

[jc42]

I'm really disappointed that nobody has yet pointed out that the Internet, SMTP, and all that were built on projects funded by the US Government. The DOD's ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), to be precise. I was using it back in the 70's, and I was quite aware of where the funding came from.

And the actual constructions was done almost entirely by universities. The few "private" companies involved (such as BB&N) were living almost entirely off government grants and contracts.

The corporate enterprise ideologists are trying hard to invent their own history so that they can claim some of the credit. But this is all historic revisionism. The real credit belongs to the evil old government, in collusion with a lot of academic hackers.

It may be true that forms of email were developed by a number of computer vendors. But they were all proprietary (even UUCP and DECnet), didn't interoperate worth a damn, and mostly couldn't be licensed for a finite cost.

It's kinda too bad. I've always thought that UUCP mail was better than SMTP. But if was freed by AT&T a bit too late, and SMTP already had the territory. Note that SMTP is defined by a set of US government standards.