Happy Birthday! Email Is 30 Years Old 383
pgrote writes: "Happy Birthday Email! It turns 30 and Yahoo! News has an article here. Of course, they have the @ sign listed as a + sign. There is an interesting look at the history here. Two neat things about this: 1) The creator can't remember the first message, but he knows it was in ALL CAPS and 2) Can you imagine your life without email now?"
Email. (Score:2, Funny)
Happy birthday email!
It may be 30 years....... (Score:1)
Life without email (Score:5, Funny)
HT
Re:Life without email (Score:3, Funny)
Now I can keep it "up" for as long the inkjet keeps printing pr0n... and that's a long time thanks to email!
Re:You moron! (Score:2, Funny)
Can I imagine my life without email? (Score:2)
Please note that was a (bad?) attempt at a joke. I don't need to modded down as troll.
Re:Can I imagine my life without email? (Score:2, Funny)
My brother used to be a telemarketer... He quit the day after he called me and asked if I wanted long distance, because I smacked him around when he got home.
SPAM (Score:1)
First email (Score:5, Funny)
Re:First email (Score:5, Funny)
Technology will always be embraced by idiots and burden geniuses.
Before Email (Score:5, Interesting)
Telex sprang from the same source as the Volkswagen automobile: The creative growth era of the early Third Reich. It was devised as a means of distributed military command and control messages and data in a time before we eve had a structure for data processing machinery. What existed at that point in time was 455 bps Baud automatic telegraph and dial-using telephone exchanges. The original Telex was essentially (director-controlled; yes, the Europeans were doing hat then) rotary telephone switches modified to carry DC telegraph lines, providing a switched service for teletypewriters in the same way as was done for telephones.
There is even a brief discussion on how to access telex from your email.
Re:Before Email (Score:2)
This is all discussed in all the geekish detail you could ever want in the Telecom Digest [mit.edu], a eighteen (18!) year archive of discussion about telecom technology.
TELECOM Digest was founded in August, 1981, by Jon Solomon. It has been published continuously since that time. The location has changed over the years. It has been published at MIT, at Boston University, at Rutgers, and for about six years (since 1989) at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. We are back at MIT as of November, 1995.
TELECOM Digest is distributed on several networks: In addition to the mailing list, the Digest appears on Usenet as the 'comp.dcom.telecom' (moderated) news group.
all caps (Score:1, Redundant)
HOT HOT HOT TEEN SLUTS WAITING FOR YOU
Random thoughts (Score:1, Flamebait)
not clean (Score:2, Insightful)
>No dead trees and no stamps.
Right. Lord knows, we all use clean electrical power sources these days!
Historical progression (Score:1, Funny)
Was the second one Make Money Fast! with QWERTYUIOP! ?
life without e-mail... (Score:2, Interesting)
Birthday... (Score:2)
One question... (Score:4, Interesting)
a)Email
b)E Mail
c)e-mail
d)email
I'd honestly like to know what the original intent was... and no, electronic mail doesn't count. (why? my post, my rules)
Re:One question... (Score:1)
Re:One question... (Score:1)
Re:One question... (Score:1)
Knuth (Score:5, Informative)
save another keystroke and your privacy (Score:2)
What's in a name? Lots!
Re:One question... (Score:2)
Always threw me off.
me, I do email.
Re:One question... (Score:2)
a)Email
b)E Mail
c)e-mail
d)email
i've no idea what they originally called it, but the difference in those choices is just a natural progression of our language. when a word like that is introduced to our culture, it's originally separated by a space, then the space becomes a hyphen, then the separation disappears altogether. so in common use, it went:
e mail -> e-mail -> email
i suppose capitalization goes away as time goes by, too, but that wasn't covered in my linguistics elective.
chris
Re:One question... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:One question... (Score:2)
I believe the english word is "enamel."
So... (Score:2, Funny)
Is it
emai-l (the Japanese porn star from Star Trek)
ema-il (verb meaning "oozing from a French guy")
em-ail (Ebonics for "they are sick")
or
e-mail? (some special kind of mail)
I wonder. If only I had more information....
Re:I know what smeg means (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Emmail? (Score:2)
Utter tosh. This make work for thoroughbred Germanic lanuages, like German and the Nordic languages, but English has had too much of a Latin influence (for example, years of occupation by France) for such generalisms.
Try speaking to someone who has learned English as a second language. English may be very simple in terms of structure (no sex for nouns and suchlike) but what makes it difficult is pronunciation - they are next to no rules on how things are pronounced. You have to start using the language to learn it, it cannot be learned by reading rules in books.
First EMail account? (Score:3, Interesting)
Running on an Atari 800xl, maxed out with 256k RAM plus four full floppies (180K each), all hooked to the net with a blazing fast 1200 baud modem. I was limited to my puny little 300 baud.
...And then came Fido...
Re:First EMail account? (Score:2)
Better yet - a buddy in Comp. Sci. back at campus told me about a Faculty of Science unix box through which I could gain access to the magical wonderland of Usenet. He coached me on how to ask for an account ("I'd like to learn Unix, please") and what NOT to say ("I'd like to hog bandwidth in my attempt to read everything ever posted to Usenet").
Sure 'nuff, the admin gave me a shell account and told me how to get a dialup account. Ahh, the world was at my fingertips. And my grades were somewhere around my shoes
Re:First EMail account? (Score:2)
It was 1992, and I was connected through a free FidoNet-connected BBS in Louisville, KY (called TSCOPE for anyone from the area). We could get Internet email accounts and a very limited Usenet feed.
The SysOp of TSCOPE actually became a friend of mine (local BBS gatherings - those were great fun). The BBS was run on two phone lines connected to a 286.
I was running my 2400 baud modem off of an Apple
I remember reading about the Waco comings and going online. Significantly different coverage (for better or worse) than the Trade Center coverage.
Re:First EMail account? (Score:2)
Re:First EMail account? (Score:2)
However, my 1976 account STILL WORKS,
although you have to attach a domain to it.
Re:First EMail account? (Score:2)
You got me beat (first time on Slashdot, BTW - congrats... I was never the first on usenet "remember when..." threads). My first mail account was on some big system in 1979. My first BBS was in 1981... an Apple ][+ with four disk drives giving a total storage of 400K. One was the BBS software and DOS, one was mail and messages, and two were seperate file areas.
Anybody else remember "bang paths"? (although I never called them that until they were obsolete... they were just "how you get to the server").
--
Evan
new? old? (Score:2, Interesting)
ahh what would life be like.. (Score:2, Funny)
We'd never know that "I Love You" ;-)
We'd probably have a new 'Outlook'!
Ahh.. I think I could do without that crap anyway.....
Just think in all that time the RFC are still not implemented with any security in mind.
HELO
FROM: bill@microsoft.com
RCPT TO:you@friend.com
DATA
blah blah blah....
.
QUIT
NOOP
NOOP
E-mail helps people find each other. (Score:4, Interesting)
They say that the internet takes people away from real interaction, but I have found it to be the opposite.
For example, I met a Brazilian woman in a chat room, and, after months of sending hundreds of e-mail messages and then talking on the telephone, I went to Brazil and lived with her family while she taught me Portuguese.
Without e-mail, I would have had much less connection with Brazilians.
What should be the Response to Violence? [hevanet.com]
I have the opposite problem. (Score:3, Funny)
The standard general answer to this question is that Brazilian women won't have sex with a man unless they are in love. However, they sometimes fall in love very quickly.
The specific answer is no. My problem is staying out of women's pants, not getting in.
Re:E-mail helps people find each other. (Score:2, Funny)
Huh? (Score:1)
What percentage of dial-up accounts hit 56.6? In my experience the phone lines will rarely support anything over 33.6 or even as low as 28.8. Just because the modem is rated for 56.6 doesn't mean it is practicly standard.
Re:baud != bps (usually) (Score:2, Informative)
Umm. No.
300 baud modems were indeed 300 bits per second. You're correct in the "symbols per second" thing, but everything including and below 2400 baud used one symbol per bit, so in those cases baud=bps. Higher modem speeds still run at 2400 baud, but use phase shifting and other tricks so that each symbol stands for N bits. For example, a 9600 bps modem works by each symbol representing 4 bits. 2400 baud times 4 bits/symbol equals 9600 bits per second.
For the purposes of this discussion, "symbols per second" means you're sampling the carrier N times per second.
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
Email rocks! (Score:4, Insightful)
I personally believe email is the killer app of the Internet. Sure, there's other stuff, like news, chat and, recently, the web, but I think email is what made it all happen. If there never was email, I think the whole Internet thing wouldn't have taken off at all. Yeah, people give credit for the recent take off to the world wide web, but I'm talking about the Internet getting to the stage it was in when the web was invented. Oh well... All I'm saying is, email rocks!
Re:Email rocks! (Score:2)
Re:Email rocks! (Score:2)
IM as implemented by ICQ or Yahoo only really serves to have strangers interrupt me with incoherent junk rather than merely fill my mailbox with it. If only IM clients has as much brains as some mail clients do.
Re:Email rocks! (Score:2)
a bit older than that, i'd imagine. from write(1):
HISTORY
A write command appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX.
Re:Email rocks! (Score:2)
I meant GUI IMs when I said 10 years, or at least ones that don't screw up your terminal window while you are trying to work. write(1) and talk(1) don't play friendly with fullscreen apps, and annoyingly don't work that well with multiple logins (e.g. screen or xterms), either.
I miss talk, and the days when a user community was around the machine - personal unix has killed a lot of that, leaving things like IMs and slashdot to fill the void.
The 100th monkey theory (Score:3, Interesting)
Then one day, it "caught on." It had reached the media, and enough people knew how it worked that suddenly everyone seemed to know how it worked. As a geek, I didn't spend half an hour explaining e-mail anymore. I got right down to the nuts and bolts of showing people how to use it.
We used BITNET, back then...
-Jared
Re:The 100th monkey theory (Score:2)
Re:The 100th monkey theory (Score:3, Funny)
Hell, back in the late 80s and early 90s they used to have the "@-Party" at the World Science Fiction Convention. All you needed was an e-mail address to get in. Even at this convocation of self-selected, very geeky people filling several hotels, all the "internet people" were able to party in one hotel suite. I remember meeting Cliff Stoll (before he went all curmugonly) and ESR was hawking his fresh-off-the-press "The New Hacker's Dictionary".
Someone even put instructions on how to crash the @-Party on one of the (physical) bulletin boards. They had printed things like "yourname@domain.com" and people came up to the door claiming that their e-mail address was yourname@domain.com. They didn't get in.
First message? (Score:2, Funny)
"FIRST POST!"
the new yardstick (Score:5, Informative)
I lost friends in an act of terrorism that the world had never seen before, or even believed possible outside of cheap paperback fiction.
I have done all these things at a distance, I have made friends and effected change on continents that I may never visit.
I have dipped my toes in the greater waters of mankind.
All this in less than 30 years.
How will my children look back when they are my age?
Will they remember a world before the arrival of the meta-verse that allows them to interact around the world, regardless of language, race, time, or class?
Will they look back with sepia-toned memories of the good-old days before corporate structures replaced government?
Might they think of us with scorn, as those who poisoned the earth and water that they inherited?
Or will they think of us as the generation that first tasted this fruit of true communication, and were alternately torn and brought together by it.
pioneers in a digital age where the hot metal was still fluid and a maleable medium, filling gaps and voids in the mold of society.
what will someone say about us in 30 years.
what do we want to leave as our legacy for our children,
food for thought.
Re:the new yardstick (Score:4, Funny)
He was born in 1975 (Score:2)
Re:the new yardstick (Score:2)
BA-DA-BING!
Re:the new yardstick (Score:2)
One century (Score:2)
Re:the new yardstick (Score:2)
It is a double edged sword (Score:2, Interesting)
People have become too depenedent on email in some cases. They can't do their job without it.
Every time a new virus comes out the spreads through email they have to shut down the whole system because all the employees are too stupid and still don't know better then to open the attachments.
But email has improved their productivity by at least 25% and the cost is worth it to them.
The thing I hate most about email is that it is so impersonal. People fire people though emails.
They applogize to them thourgh them, ask people out on dates. It gives the anti-social a way to not interact. I hate that
Hi! How are you? (Score:4, Funny)
See you later! Thanks
Attachment #1 -- me&judy.jpg.vbs
email, the absurd history (Score:5, Funny)
"Yes Mr. Tomlinson?"
"Hi! How are you? I send you this file in order to have your advice. See you later. Thanks"
More critical than we realized (Score:5, Insightful)
Consequently, in our Business Continuity Plan, e-mail was designated a "Tier 2" application. This means that it was slated for recovery only after the critical business applications were restored. It was felt that e-mail was a nice-to-have that could easily be replaced with the telephone and fax in a crisis.
This perception changed dramatically on September 11. We quickly learned how e-mail had become integral to the business. It was the communications mechanism that facilitated most of our internal information exchange. Restoring e-mail moved from second-tier to our highest priority because it was critical to recovery and to communicating with our scattered employees. With hundreds of dislocated people, it was the most reliable way for our clients and our employees to reach specific individuals.
When future historians talk about the way technology revolutionized business, e-mail will be on the list. My company realized we can't do business without it.
Re:More critical than we realized (Score:3, Interesting)
Email is much more than just another form of messaging. I've seen email used as a form of decision records, as a primitive form of version control (the email thread contains each revision of the document in question), as discussion threads, and even as a form of middleware for some very significant applications (like train dispatching). In a company like mine, end-to-end delivery of email messages that exceeds 30 seconds is seen as a serious degradation of service (no kidding!)
Consitent, timely, and reliable delivery of email in large companies (outside, perhaps, of large dot.com online sales companies) is arguably more important than nearly any other form of networking.
I can imagine (Score:2)
'You've got cake' (Score:2)
Of course, there's spam. That's "new."
Humble attitude (Score:2, Insightful)
It's always a refreshing moment when one reads an article like this where a technology innovator (I'd say hero, but lately I like to reserve that term) is truly appreciative of what he's done but, while appreciative of what the impact has been, not motivated to drive an agenda with it.
Yeah, this might be an intellectual flame - but I'll bet many agree with the basic point.
Life without email (Score:2, Insightful)
I've often wished I had the guts to take the same action as Donald Knuth and get rid of my e-mail address [stanford.edu]:
Of course, I'll be the first to admit that DEK's time is more in demand than mine.
10 vs. 3-fingers (Score:5, Funny)
I keep wandering how our parents managed life with only 2-3 fingers; must have been very boring. So what were they doing with the "other" hand?
Re:10 vs. 3-fingers (Score:2, Funny)
Can you... (Score:5, Insightful)
I try to, oh how I try to imagine, every waking minute of my day, how beautiful life would be without e-mail. I hate e-mail, I'm chronically abused and assaulted by e-mail. I have a boss who wields e-mail as a weapon. When he's pissed, he buries me under e-mail, and then wants to know why I can't get anything done. I've had days where he's sent me two-hundred e-mails, some with seven or eight attachments, paragraphs and pages and volumes and books of e-mail.
This turd's office is only fifteen feet away from my cube, but I can't get a face-to-face with him. Because he's got e-mail. It's not a communications medium, it's an ass-covering medium.
When I quit this job (and I have an interview this week) I'm going to mass-print a copy of every e-mail he's ever sent me on every goddamned printer in the company. It'll make our NIMDA infection look benign.
Re:Can you... (Score:5, Insightful)
...but he knows it was in ALL CAPS (Score:2, Funny)
ALL CAPS? I didn't think AOL was around in the 70's.
if it were invented today... (Score:2, Interesting)
If the patent office then was as fscked up as it is tody, e-mail could have been patented.
And it would have gotten nowhere. It would not be the major phenomenon it is today.
This is the perfect example with which to vigorous beat about the head and shoulders those who defend software patents as necessary to innovation. "What about e-mail, you dork?"
Happy BDay! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Happy BDay! (Score:2)
Mama Chili Recip.doc.pif
Bit of email history (Score:4, Informative)
The future of email (Score:2)
Email is come-from-behind technology. Although it predates voice mail and fax by nearly 15 years, it is only in the last 5 years or so that it rivals them in popularity.
Despite its success, email hasn't supplanted either voice mail or fax. Nearly everyone who has email also uses voice mail or fax, often both at work and at home. In spite of the fact that both voice mail and fax can be sent as an email attachment, those two technologies show no signs of disappearing. The sales of fax machines continues to rise and voice mail appears to be at saturation.
As near as I can surmise, both voice mail and fax have a higher degree of perceived urgency than email does. This urgency comes from the urgency of the technology they supplement or replace. Voice mail is a stand in for a telephone call itself, the most urgent form of communication. Faxes replaced couriers, which also were reserved for the most important documents.
Email seems to be primarily used for non-urgent communication. Part of the reason is, perhaps, that the sender of email cannot be sure if the message has arrived. For voice mail, if you get the greeting and the beep, you are reasonably sure of delivery. For fax, the fax standard guarantees that the fax will not be sent unless it is being received at the other end.
In one way, the urgency of email will probably not be determined by the message but by the attachments. The ability of email to move, store and forward electronic documents in a standardized way may determine its future development.
In another way, the urgency of email will be raised by email messages generated by computer. Because email can be generated by computer much easier than voice mail and fax, more and more email could be of the alert variety that tells the recipient that something needs his attention.
As a result I would look for some kind of encoding that flagged an email as urgent beyond simply the opinion of the sender. For instance, the email addresses that users give out might someday contain some unique priority designation so that priority could be determined by the source of the message.
One can see the process at work now when sys admins have computers send email alerts to their pagers and cell phones.
Once urgency can be reliably defined in an email message it could change its fundamental characteristic, which at the moment is convenience.
Your timescale is off. (Score:3, Insightful)
Voicemail is otherwise known as an answering machine. I admit I had email before I owned an answering machine, but in the days before Bell allowed "foreign" devices to connect to their lines, answering machines were fairly uncommon.
Certainly once you could get a magnetic wire recorder, you could do an answering machine. The oldest unit I have heard of, dates from the late 30's. (I am sure someone tried it with phonograph technology, but I don't think it was commercially viable.)
If you are looking for a business practice changing technology that is newer than email, try FEDEX.
One question I proposed for the Nerd Purity tests (the long ones with the possibility of >500 point scores). 2 points for having an email address in high school. If you are class of '85 or earlier, add 2 points for each year. Class of '75 or earlier, add 5 points per year.
As to the + vs @ nomenclature: I remember in 1977 spending 10 minutes explaining to a business card printer just what that blob was (at sign didn't cut it, he needed "commercial at" before he got it. There wasn't a typewriter handy so I could point.), and that "DP@MIT-ML" was correct, and "DP @ MIT-ML" wasn't.
Oh yea, as to the UPPER CASE, the commonly available terminals of the day didn't provide it.
-dp-
Re:The future of email (Score:3, Insightful)
There are 3 problems with return receipt as it is now implemented:
Some email clients to support it, like mine (elm).
The user may not look at his email for days, as I often don't.
The user may ignore it, as I often do when I use Outlook.
What's needed is some standard. The fact that there isn't one after all these years suggests that users are happy with the level of reliability for the urgency of the messages.
The inventor of email said he invented email not because anyone wanted it but because it was a neat idea. Probably if he had thought automatic return receipt was a neat idea, we'd have it now.
E-Mail is not 30 years old today. (Score:5, Informative)
E-Mail is more than 30 years old. Doug Englebart's NLS system was doing email for years prior to '71, and infact, demonstrated it publically in '68 [stanford.edu].
Get your facts straight, gang.
Cheers,
+1 informative on the MQR standard (Score:2)
-- MarkusQ
True, but... (Score:2)
Re:E-Mail is not 30 years old today. (Score:2)
Re:E-Mail is not 30 years old today. (Score:2)
Englebart was no doubt years ahead of his time but email as we know it is traced back to Tomlinson.
As the article about Ray Tomlinson says:
Like a number of then existing electronic message programs, the oldest dating from the early 1960s, SNDMSG only worked locally; it was designed to allow the exchange of messages between users who shared the same machine. Such users could create a text file and deliver it to a designated "mail box."
Tomlinson's achievement seems to have been "transferring files among linked computers at remote sites within ARPANET", that is creating users' mail boxes accessable over ARPNET, which did not exist as such before 1968.
As Englebart describes [rwth-aachen.de] the system: "Each individual has private file space, and the group has community space, on a high-speed disc with a capacity of 96 million characters." The system therefore doesn't appear to be the network environment that Tomlinson was working in.
Englebart's list of Pioneering Firsts [bootstrap.org] is said to include "integrated hypermedia email" but the term email may be an anachronism [m-w.com] in this context.
Is that "the first Internet E-mail"? (Score:2)
Tomlinson apparently was the first to send E-mail via the Internet (or any network?), and he is said to actually have adapted a time sharing mail program to do this.
Texas Instruments +30 (Score:2, Informative)
TESLA NOT MARCONI! (Score:3, Insightful)
first mail after reading this (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe it's about time... (Score:3, Interesting)
On a lighter note, I couldn't imagine life without email.
The future of email is Unified Messaging... (Score:2)
Another consolidation that I really like, is Instant messaging products, like Tillian [trillian.cc]. I can now get my AOL/AIM/Yahoo/ICQ/IRC in one program. (The irc is ok, but I'll stick with mirc and bitchx)..
--
Another Verizon customer, DSL'less in Seattle.
I don't quite remember my first email ether. (Score:2)
Mail was pretty simple. Everybody who wanted to use it, created a file 'mail' in their home directory which was permitted append-only others. (You think ACLs are a new idea?). The mail program took your message, added a header, and appended it to the end of the recipient's mail box. (much like UNIX mail does, except that the destination mailboxes were decentralized).
The first multi-system mail had interesting routing features. I remember a message from Edmonton to Calgary (180 miles south of Edmonton) went south to the states, through New York and California before arriving in Calgary via Utah.
Not long afterwards I got introduced to Unix, and the Usenet. Needless to say I was hooked. I was soon expounding the values of email to everybody who would listen. -- trying to get them to understand why it was, in so many ways, better than fax, for most written communications.
It was almost a crusade -- trying to get as many people as possible onto email. Even back then, I was into remote administration -- running boxes from home over a 300 baud modem with a homemade terminsl program. I still remember one person replying to one of my emails:
The clock was accurate.Another fine set of facts from Yahoo (Score:2)
He also conceived the now-famous ``+'' symbol to ensure a message was sent to a designated recipient.
+ was pretty famous for years before that. This is not the 5000th anniversary of addition. And how did they miss the correct symbol by such a margin anyway?
And, the top-of-the-line modem connection at the time operated at a snail-like 300 baud, roughly one-twentieth of the speed of today's standard 56.6 kbps modem.
300*20=6000
Calculators are cheap... please get one.
Another major stage in its development came in the mid-90s as the first Web browsers introduced the World Wide Web to the couch potato.
The world wide web must have been fairly lame before the invention of the browser.
not_cub
Before the at@ there was the bang! (Score:3, Informative)
mailto:sprintlink!exodus!andover!slashdot!stavr
First Email (Score:2)
Hey Mike, this is a test. Call me if you get this.
Yeah, the name is probably wrong and he might have been asking for a fax, but it just sounds so Engineer-like that I believe it.
Okay, here's my PRIORITIES! (Score:2, Funny)
2) Get some HOT TEENAGE SLUTS
3) Buy printer cartriges
4) Take a free vaction to Orlando, Florida
5) Get a Legal Marijuana Alternative
6) Boost my windows reliability
7) Make my penis bigger
8) Become wealthy working at home
9) Have a personal relationship with God
10) Say HI! to Dan. He has some HOT TEENAGER SLUTS for me.
After all, if there wasn't email, how could I get PRIORITIES?
Re:what about after the @ sign? (Score:2, Informative)