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

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