In The US, Email Is Only For Old People

lxw56 writes "Two years after Slashdot discussed the theory that Korean young people were rejecting email, an article at the Slate site written by Chad Lorenz comes to the same conclusion about the United States. 'Those of us older than 25 can't imagine a life without e-mail. For the Facebook generation, it's hard to imagine a life of only e-mail, much less a life before it. I can still remember the proud moment in 1996 when I sent my first e-mail from the college computer lab. It felt like sending a postcard from the future. I was getting a glimpse of how the Internet would change everything--nothing could be faster and easier than e-mail.'"

Comments

In 1992...

[istartedi]

In 1992 I had an account on a Sun cluster, with e-mail and USENET. The PCs were still running DOS. The Suns were running some *NIX variant (Solaris, I assume, although at the time I just assumed it was Unix). The Suns were all slick and graphical. I could read USENET in one Window while waiting for a simulation to finish, and if I needed to find stuff there was this really cool thing called Gopher.

The PCs were the first thing to get this thing called the World Wide Web, but the only way to access it was with a terminal based browser. This sucked, I thought. Gopher is so much better; but my opinion was colored by the fact that the OS on the machines where Gopher was installed was better.

Across the grounds there was a lab that had one of these machines that ran a windowed OS for PCs. It was written by the same people who wrote the DOS for the PCs. DOS worked fine, so I thought I'd check out this new MS Windows and see how it stacked up to X. Boy, I never really tried it, because the machine spent at least 5 minutes booting. I lost patience and walked away before it finished. Apparently, they had installed it on an underpowered machine, to say the least.

I briefly owned a DOS PC, and then, believe it or not, dropped out of tech for a while. When I decided to get back into programming, the beige box I got came with Windows95. I was impressed at what they had done; IMHO, they surpassed X in terms of useability as a desktop with that version of Windows. I warmed up to the WWW, thanks to the free beta of Netscape v0.96 that came from the ISP I signed up with.

In just a few short years, my favored desktop went from X on a Sun to Windows95 on a PC, and I haven't seen anything yet that would really make me want to run *NIX on a desktop.

E-mail, OTOH, has endured through all of it.