Email Turns Thirty 213
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.
already happend (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:already happend (Score:1, Funny)
(I've got Karma to burn)
Re:already happend (Score:1)
Sorry, but FAX is still hulking along... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sorry, but FAX is still hulking along... (Score:2, Interesting)
My SMTP server to your SMTP server. Seriously I have always questioned claims that phone lines are more secure, as phone lines are an easy, static object that anyone with an iota of technical knowledge can hook into (knowing specifically who their victim is) at the local phone junction. Trying to grab someone's packets without controlling their direct ISP is significantly more difficult.
Let me put it another way: There's a business that you want to steal financial information from -> Do you go to the phone line feed on the outside of their building and tap into the wires, or look in their garbage, etc., or do you get an @Home connection and hope they broadcast on your subnet?
Re:Sorry, but FAX is still hulking along... (Score:2)
Even if they manage that, using Blowfish or Rijndael (sp) in your emails would make it impossible to glean information from an intercepted email. 2048 bit DH encryption is significant enough to deter the FBI, so you can bet that it will throw a wrench into the works of potential theives/embezzlers.
It wouldn't even be as hard as forcing the no-nothing account managers at banks to encrypt and email the applications instead of faxing them. All you'd really have to do is rewrite the application program they're already using to take down customer information so that it encrypts the data and emails it, rather than printing or faxing it. This is a 1-2 day project for most of the coders I know.
Re:Sorry, but FAX is still hulking along...Server (Score:2)
Originally, we did have a fax server, but it was scrapped in favor of mulitple fax lines for management reasons... read: management thinks they understand the fax machines, but can't grasp the fax server, even when it plunks faxes in their Outlook inbox. The justification was 'cost of operation'. Yeah, sure. Whatever.
Even with a fax server, however, the data still has to go between an image format and Ascii to fit inside the DB. Frankly, I trust OCR software more than data entry, but results may vary...
Re:already happend (Score:1)
Am I insane, or did Email already kill the fax machine? I get about 20 emails a day, and not one fax.
Not insane, just (apparently) self-centered.
Re:already happend (Score:1, Funny)
I get twice that in spam a day. (Which never reaches my inbox thanks to Spambouncer [spambouncer.org])
Total e-mail, I get ~1000 a day, only 2-3 of which actually go into my inbox. The rest being filtered by procmail [procmail.org] into various mailing list folders to which I subscribe. Out of those 2-3 at least one is a forward from my mother which has 10 pages of AOL addresses and a little poem on the bottom which tells me to forward this to 10 people and my cat will have puppies.
But thats a different complain altogether...
Email must be royal (Score:5, Interesting)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/02/011122 8 [slashdot.org]
Re:Email must be royal (Score:1, Informative)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/02/011122 8 [slashdot.org]
Re:Email must be royal (Score:2, Funny)
Happy Birthday! Email Is 30 Years Old [slashdot.org]
Re:Email must be royal (Score:1)
Re:Email must be royal (Score:1)
Re:Email must be royal (Score:1)
Steve.
Re:Email must be royal (Score:1)
Hi, how are you? (Score:5, Funny)
<<Happy Birthday.exe>>
Re:Hi, how are you? (Score:1)
Some people just don't appreciate the simple beauty of a plain ASCII email message, clearly written.
Re:Hi, how are you? (Score:1)
When are you posting from - 1993? 'Round here the only time we don't email executables is if we can get EWF [1] in a VB script :)
1. EWF: Equivalent Worm Functionality
Re:Hi, how are you? (Score:2)
Nobody here, and I mean nobody, outside of IT really needs to receive an executable. If an executable has to be sent via e-mail we can contact whoever is sending it and have them rename the extension or put it in a zip file.
Now if only I was allowed to reject mail containing VB Script or JavaScript I could not only be a lot safer but I could also filter out half of the porn spam we've been getting in one fell swoop.
Re:Hi, how are you? (Score:2, Informative)
Click here. [theregister.co.uk]
E-mail will not kill the fax machine (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:1)
Of course, this is New York, it was an IT job and I saw all of the adds online. I'm sure your mileage will vary in other locations and industries.
And yes, they all wanted Word or PDF and they all printed them out for the interview, but its not exactly hard to print a file that's been emailled to you! This is more about people wanting hardcopy than anything else. I don't think most peoeple care whether that hardcopy is faxed to them or they have to print it out.
Re:E-mail will not kill the fax machine (Score:1)
Careful here, or your printer might get a virus!
Re:E-mail will not kill the fax machine (Score:1)
Interesting ... my last job hunting session was 80-90% online and more than half wanted faxed applications. The job I eventually landed was one where I found the ad online and faxed in the application.
shoe on other foot here, bud. (Score:2)
Who says the East Coast is not on the cutting edge of new technology technology? One of the best people I ever hired gave me his first resume written in pencil on paper. M$, be not proud.
A Word formated document from a programer is evidence of wasted resources. All it proves is they:
1. Spent time and money at a copy shop. Bowed to reality, working for the devil but not very hard.
2. Are wasting enough disk space for M$ Office. Lazy or stupidly unethical, it's either OEM or they got some LEET cracked trash from Cairo.
3. Have figured out how to install Star Office or some other program that has micros~.DOC format. Oh yeah, they also keep it up to date, AHHHH!
Send me a link, send me HTML, or just send me text (prefered) thank you. Fax, well OK, if you must. Word, PowerPoint and other useless chrome will be sent to /dev/null.
Re:E-mail will not kill the fax machine (Score:4, Funny)
dave
(login not working)
Re:E-mail will not kill the fax machine (Score:1)
What do you think is easier, printing resumes or scanning them and running them through character recognition software? The point is arguable, but I'd personally opt for printing them.
Re:Today's Witless Luddite. (Score:1)
Name one. I defy you."
Um. My last employer. The ad was online and they wanted faxed applications, just like 50%+ of the other employers in my job search.
Re:Today's Witless Luddite. (Score:1)
Thats why you insist on or convert it to ASCII. when was the last time anyone sent their resume as a PDF?"
I suggest you look here [slashdot.org].
On the next day... (Score:5, Funny)
To: Watson@bell.net
From: Alex@bell.net
Subj: You could be a millionaire next week!
Re:On the next day... (Score:2)
Satan has a special hell prepared for Lawrence Cantor and Martha Siegel.
Spam's Birthday? (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Spam's Birthday? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Spam's Birthday? (Score:1)
Re:Spam's Birthday? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.skypoint.com/members/gimonca/usewar.ht
clever little hack (Score:4, Interesting)
But isn't hacking a Bad Thing(TM)?
Re:clever little hack (Score:1)
Re:clever little hack (Score:1)
To celebrate the birthday of email: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:To celebrate the birthday of email: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:To celebrate the birthday of email: (Score:1)
... No, no nurse. I said remove his SPECTACLES!
where would we be? (Score:3, Funny)
Here's a mirror of the article for non-subscribers (Score:3, Informative)
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."
I wish (Score:2, Insightful)
also, Michael, you seem really bitter these days... whats up with that?
Re:I wish (Score:1)
It's amazing how much innovation this caused... (Score:2, Funny)
Really amazing when you think about it. None of those amazing scientific inventions would've been possible without email.
Re:It's amazing how much innovation this caused... (Score:1)
Fax a Regressive Step (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Fax will die but the name will live forever (Score:2)
These things will not be called email ever even though the underlying communication mechanism might well be that.
Fax machines that use voice lines will die. Fax machines will not.
Re:Fax will die but the name will live forever (Score:1)
I don't call my car an "Internal Combustion Vehicle". I hate it when people have to make a point that it's digital.
Duh.
Yea, this was a stupid rant.
Re:Fax will die but the name will live forever (Score:2)
Fax was not a real word until recently. Even a few years ago many dictionaries refused to acknowledge its existence.
The word fax certainly did not exist before facsimile machines became popular.
Now that it is here, it will not go away while people have "faxes" to send.
Re:Fax a Regressive Step (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Fax a Regressive Step (Score:1)
Fewer characters=easier to encode=easier to make into electrontic media (e-mail, EDI, etc.)
More characters=more difficult to encode=better suited to paper
If you can't directly encode it, you take a picture, and push the picture around (i.e. a fax).
Hope that helps.
Re:Fax a Regressive Step (Score:1)
It's the other 'way round - if you didn't fax it, you'd have to encode each character in an email, deal with non-ASCII character sets in operating systems which (at the time) didn't support those sufficiently, etc. The argument is that faxing was easier than the all-electronic solution for the Japanese, and since they made such damn good fax machines it turned out to be good enough for the U.S. too.
Personally, I can't remember the last useful fax I got, but I guess some people still use it. It does have that "vestigial tail" feeling to it, I agree.
Look out for the ersatz intelligentsia (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Look out for the ersatz intelligentsia (Score:1, Offtopic)
scued. (Score:2)
Actually the real question is:
Hpow many Unique Business realated fax's do you get? how many Unique Business related eMails to you get?
Re:Look out for the ersatz intelligentsia (Score:1)
There you go, reinforcing the pro-FAX arguement.
Email was a relief for fax users (Score:1)
(Happy "double" 30th years)
Re:Email was a relief for fax users (Score:1)
Re:Email was a relief for fax users (Score:1)
fax will never die... at least not yet. (Score:2)
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, so a company get's stuck with paying thousands per month for broadband access in order to download those 1meg word files and 10 meg Power point presentations.
Re:fax will never die... at least not yet. (Score:3)
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:fax will never die... at least not yet. (Score:3)
please, look at how the other 75% of the business world operates.
Re:fax will never die... at least not yet. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:fax will never die... at least not yet. (Score:2)
INstead of getting your info off of marketing ad's why dont you call and get a quote, the world looks very different when you actually try and get service. the only solutions out there is still overpriced for the small and medium business.
Email turns thirty eh? (Score:1, Redundant)
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Email enabled devices (Score:1)
I want a box that can replace my fax machine, where i in addition to 'enter recipients phone #', also have the oppurtunity to enter recipients email.
Vice-versa, give my fax a email-address and let it print out stuff people emails it!
But please, please do it in a smart way, I don't want a 4-hour setup nightmare or a dos'ed fax machine
Are we getting there? when?
Doesn't it seem... (Score:2)
- Freed
Is he related to Anne??? (Score:1, Offtopic)
Is this a joke ? (Score:2, Informative)
read here [slashdot.org]: that story was already submitted months ago.
or i miss 100% the point...
fax replacement (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Only 30 years old? (Score:1)
IBM had it's own huge network for messaging and internal communications, including their own satellites, in the 60's.
Let's be real here and stop trying to revise history so the 'good guys' (you know, those 'internet pioneers' all the script kiddies and various 'hackers' worship) don't automatically win all contests.
Re:Only 30 years old? (Score:1)
It's not attempting to revise history, it's talking about email, the electronic messages that can cross networks.
Call for Automated Email Filters (Score:2)
- Emails can be classified under any number of keywords. The user can selectively view the messages under any keyword.
- Each keyword is associated with a policy that specifies importance and expiration (when the message is to be deleted and whether the user needs to confirm a deletion).
- The system (after learning from watching the user) will suggest categories for incoming email.
Any systems like this out there. Any systems that would be relatively easier to modify to include these features.Re:Call for Automated Email Filters (Score:3, Insightful)
EZPass & Email :: The Connection (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:1)
Re:EZPass & Email :: The Connection (Score:2)
Then what's the point of speeding? If you're going to average 65 mph, why not just go 65 mph? You'll get there in the same amount of time as you would by going real fast and then real slow, and you won't run the risk of having your license taken away by a trooper on the side of the road.
If I'm going to speed, I'm going to do it right!
Re:EZPass & Email :: The Connection (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:EZPass & Email :: The Connection (Score:3, Funny)
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:EZPass & Email :: The Connection (Score:2, Interesting)
In fact, there is *always* a homework problem like this in a Calculus I class. Usually, the problem has a student doing this and the teacher asks, "Could you get out of the ticket? No.".
Where can you use it at McDonald's? (Score:2)
Let's try this again (Score:2)
if that Tomlinson was so bright ... (Score:1)
why was she fired on the spot when
failing to reconnect slashdot to the
world some time ago ?
Besides, it seems to me that @ was slow to catch
up : I remember addresses with ! ! ! !
and BITNET addresses with %.
Undocumented history (Score:3, Informative)
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... [pretext.com]
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.
What a finish for 1971 (Score:2, Interesting)
procmail's birthday (Score:4, Interesting)
Speaking of which, tomorrow (December 7th) will be the 11th anniversary of procmail v1.00 [procmail.org], 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 [procmail.org].
HotDeals / SaveBig: pm0.net (Score:2)
...and becoming problematic to handle. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
happy birthday email! (Score:2, Funny)
that's right folks. email turns 30 today. now how could have it existed that long when
algore invented the internet in the mid 90's....
anyway, if you forward this message to 30 people Bill Gates will personally send you one dollar and donate 10 cents to a cancer charity in Nigeria which will in turn deposit the money in a bank account you opened for them in the united states and use the money to advertise the newest greatest weight loss pills ever invented which also happen to make you look 10 years younger but only if you order 6 dozen cookies and the recipie from neiman marcus using the credit card with the $100,000 limit that you recently got pre-approved for with no credit check and no deposit so you can purchase your own .BIZ or .INFO domain just like nike and pepsi and be a webshop with 24hour free unlimited porn downloads of britney spears, which by the way you can talk to live by dialing 1-900-i-love-spam, which is a registered trademark of the Hormel corporation, and tastes good on crackers.
mirror (Score:1, Redundant)
By KATIE HAFNER
SK any expert to speculate on the future of e-mail, and you are bound to hear two words: versatility and mobility.
E-mail is already becoming more and more portable. BlackBerry pagers that send and receive e-mail are increasingly standard issue not just for corporate executives but for members of government as well. Cellphones that can exchange short text messages are also becoming common.
In the next few years, it seems the leading potential victim of e-mail may be the fax machine. Those who toil on the technical side of things, developing the software and standards that make the technology appear seamless to its users, foresee a day when e-mail is used routinely for documents that are now faxed. They also predict the complete integration of the In boxes for voice messages, faxes and e-mail.
"One can imagine calling a voice-mail server that has access to your entire e- mail box," with speech-recognition software aiding voice access to e-mail, said Vinton G. Cerf, a founder of the Internet who is now a senior vice president at WorldCom (news/quote). "An e-mail can be `addressed' to a phone number so that it can be `delivered' by phone call," he said.
Such so-called universal messaging systems already exist, but they are not especially easy to use. "It will be another five years or so before that's really attacked seriously," said Dave Crocker, a consultant who works on technical standards for e-mail.
Already, said Walter Ulrich, an early developer of commercial e-mail who is now an entrepreneur and consultant in Houston, "the interlinking of e-mail, information, directories, etc., is so smooth that e- mail almost disappears as a separate function and becomes part of the plumbing."
In five years, he added, e-mail may routine convey full-motion color video with instant click-through to any number of attachments and points of reference. "It will be better than the sci-fi movie `Outland' by a factor of 10," Mr. Ulrich said.
In five years, Dr. Cerf suggested, more than half of all bills will be sent by e-mail, and other advances that are still in the sputtering early stages will be commonplace.
He expects to see people sending e-mail to Internet-enabled appliances, in what he calls "a kind of deferred interaction mode."
In addition, "delivery of large attachments may be by way of pointers to object repositories so that recipients can direct the delivery of the attachment to targets other than the addressee's e-mail box," Dr. Cerf said. "This would allow more flexible manipulation of large attachments by way, for example, of two-way pagers."
At the same time, the sheer volume of e- mail is overwhelming. Dr. Cerf said he had archives of his own e-mail on tape going back to 1971.
"Some historian is going to have fun going through a fur ball of e-mail someday," he said.
Peter J. Denning, a professor of computer science at George Mason University, said In boxes have reached the point where 90 percent of the incoming mail is immediately disposed of.
Though better filters will help, he said, "we will need radically different practices of time management to cope, or else we'll give up on e-mail entirely."
Re:mirror (Score:1)
domc
Re:New york times login (Score:2, Informative)
Re:New york times login (Score:2)
Be careful. (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:New york times login (Score:2, Informative)
pw: slash2001
Re:Too bad it's almost unusable now. (Score:2)
No : mail is far from killing the fax, especially on a juridical point of view:
Re:Too bad it's almost unusable now. (Score:1)
I seem to remember a
I'd provide a link, but I'm crap at finding old stories on slashdot.
So why is it always free mailboxes that get so much spam? Well because I for one would never use my 'real' addresses for, say, subscribing to an online newsletter etc. That's what free mail accounts are for - subscribing to things where you think they'll sell mail lists.
Just my opinion, but fuck me it's a good one.