The History of Electronic Mail

[carlsson]

Tom Van Vleck writes about the history of electronic mail, at least from his horizon at MIT in the early 1960's:

http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html

Electronic mail around 1965 sounds amazing, but the part about instant messaging is what really surprises me. Certainly people would be working on their project during the computer time, but one wonders how many of the instant messages were unrelated nonsense.

Prior to the time-sharing systems, I suppose computer operators would exchange messages via written notes on paper instead of some storage media?

Haha. I followed the link about 7094, reading about early programming languages:

MAD was descended from ALGOL 58: it had block structure and a fast compiler, and if your compilation failed, the compiler used to print out a line printer portrait of Alfred E. Neumann. (MIT took that out to save paper.)

Computer people already (?!) back then had a great sense of humor. I suppose the equivalent today would be if the compiler upon error opened a full screen window featuring Bart Simpson saying something demeaning to the user.

 

[Terry Yager]

Computer humor:
I was surprized when I first learned how far back 'Blinkenlights' posters began, even before the computer was invented:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/blinkenlights.html

--T

 

[CP/M User]

I always assumed e-mail was the product around the NeXT
system, though being late 80s based & micro - it's easy to see
how many of those earlier larger computer systems could
incorporate such a system. Would NeXT be the first
microcomputer based system to come with e-mail as standard?

As a rule, e-mail would have to run from one system to another
- not just send messages internally via the system - could
that me deemed as E-mail.

Now it seems that Voice messages could be making a move, my
Yahoo seems to have this ability - though I've never studied
it fully to understand what the workings are - or if it needs
a pal on Yahoo to talk with (certainally my other e-mail has
no facilities to support it - maybe if other popular e-mail
systems provide they might work inbetween). The great thing of
course is the ability to express full emotions, humor and even
sadness. A voice can be a powerful thing! :-D

CP/M User.

 

[kb2syd]

I always assumed e-mail was the product around the NeXT

A product of the NEXT indeed.

We were connected to the uucp back bone and exchanging email internationally in the mid 1980s. This was running on a Radio Shack TRS-80 model 12 upgraded to a 16 under Xenix with 6 connected wyse-50 terminals and two modem ports.

Look up UUCP in the wiki.

 

[carlsson]

Perhaps NeXT was the first with WYSIWYG e-mail, today better known as HTML e-mail, except HTML was not invented back then. I remember testing one e-mail client on our NeXTstation. It worked like a graphic word processor with fonts and sizes. When sending, you could either omit all formatting and get pure text, or save it as a RTF document, and then Compressed; the algorithm implemented by Unix commands compress and uncompress. Finally the message was UUEncoded or something similar. I'm unsure if MIME attachments had been defined, but it sent the encoded file in the body, like old times. If the recipient was a NeXT user, the e-mail would uncompress automatically, but for others it probably was a pain to read these e-mails, in particular as there was no headers or surrounding text describing what all this coded text was.

 

[atari2600a]

HTML & the WWW was developed on the NexT. So...Yeah...

 

[Erik]

Yeah, the next was used as a platform for development of the WWW but the basic components were around well before that. Electronic Mail systems pre-dated glass terminals and there was messaging capability in the original ARPANET - on which the Internet was built.

 

[kb2syd]

Well, I was replying about this line.

Would NeXT be the first microcomputer based system to come with e-mail as standard?

That is, the "microcomputer". If you considered a Next as a "microcomputer" then my radio shack example qualifies.

Then there was UUPC (uucp for the PC). That was way cool.

 

[CP/M User]

kb2syd wrote:

> That is, the "microcomputer". If you considered a
> Next as a "microcomputer" then my radio shack example
> qualifies.

Oh okay.

Interesting the NeXT was used to develop WWW & HTML though.

In more recent times I had the ability of setting my e-mail
client to use UUENCODE in my text based e-mails when sending
attachments certainally ingenious.

CP/M User.