How to Send an Email in 1984
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
Outside, UUCP paths were used. Example: Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!rms@mit-prep (example from an RMS newsgroup post: http://tech-insider.org/free-software/research/1985/0610.htm)
And you'd reverse the host order to send mail in the other direction!
I remember sending almost everything through decvax!decwrl!mit-eddie when communicating with the outside world from DEC.
Frankly getting the routing right was a big pain in the ass. You'd sometimes have to try sending the message a bunch of times as you try to get the route spec just right.
Even so, email was pretty great. It was also very much "old hat" when the world finally got exited about it in the 90's.
I wish to have the time! or to be Saturday -- is not fair to post this on a Monday :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/4boa6p/...
With many services, after a certain size you begin to need tools to curate the content on the network, separate signal from noise, etc. But in a perfect world these could be handled and I think your statement would remain true.
For example, most forums begin with a small, dedicated user base that mostly knows each other and act in good will, but as the userbase grows all of these aspects fade as the Eternal September/tragedy of the commons effects take place. It's easy to see with the progression of subreddits for example, since they are created so often and can grow to very high subscribed counts, you get to see this pattern repeat pretty often.
If you were a user sending emails via a terminal session, I could see it as being considered "better", but if you were the sysadmin keeping (say) the Vaxen alive and "fair and balanced", it could be a non-trivial amount of work!
I do remember one of the profs grousing that "if you can't read your email with 'cat' then you are subscribed to too many email lists."
When I worked in Tokyo, all of our SunOS workstations did the BSD Unix thing, and we got corporate email via some sort of X.400 relay over an IBM mainframe (I think). This was before Mutt or Pine and may have been Elm or could have been something else - I don't remember. But, it was weird, because we could just Telnet into our compadre's SunOS boxes in the US directly (dedicated line). I don't know what the rationale behind this "split" was, but whenever we called corporate IT about email being down - they would always say: "What's email?". They must have used a different word for their X.400 batch messaging system.
They were probably using Slackware because JOE is still my preferred editor, and JOE was the default $EDITOR on Slackware.
The class was a distance-learning class in Special Relativity. Class discussion occurred in a local Usenet newsgroup using TIN over a dial-up shell account as the default reader. I still use Usenet (many comp.* groups are still active and constructive) and TIN is still my preferred reader, though for a few years I was using Forte Agent.
Otherwise it felt a lot more "civilized" than Prestel - still only a 2400bps modem at first, but a variety of "offline readers" with fairly decent UIs, like Thor (Amiga) and terminal programs like Ncomm (also Amiga) that allowed heavily scripted exchanges with the BBSs to automate message exchanges and file up/downloads.
But once I got a direct internet connection at university it only took months before I pretty much stopped calling BBSs - it's amazing (and a bit sad) how quick the decline was, even though some survived for quite a while via telnet.
As I recall, Qmail was the one I used--mostly with a commercial PC-Board system in a nearby city. People forget that even intrastate telephone calls could be pretty pricey on a per minute basis through at least the first part of the 1990s so it made a lot of sense to login, download/upload, logoff, and read/respond locally.
A number of the bigger BBSs survived for a time as dial-up ISPs before broadband became common. I don't really remember when I stopped using them. Probably sometime in the mid-nineties.
I had a modem starting in about 1984 or so but they were certainly still a geek thing for consumers at that point.
E.g. trying a portable modem on a payphone in a train and a hotel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5OlzonbgC0&t=0s
And, similarly, typing account number and password visibly on TV
They have it switched to "1200Rx-75Tx VIEWTEXT" and "1200".
£129 in 1984 is roughly £390 today, according to http://inflation.stephenmorley.org/
Has anyone converted that audio into BBC software? What was it?
I never managed to load the software (because our TV didn't have an audio jack and I just stuck a tape recorder up to the speaker exactly as the nice lady suggested we not do) and I didn't know anyone who did, but I've left a link to a recent demodulation from that very video up thread.
Then I think I went back to playing Zany Golf...
Prestel was big in the UK partly because the ubiquitous BBC Micro had a Videotext chip in it, so a modem made a very obvious upgrade if you had one. But you could also get standalone terminals. Never saw one myself.
France, by the way, had an equivalent system, but which was hugely more popular: Minitel. It was technically very similar to Prestel (it may even have used the same protocols and videotext chip, but I can't find a reference). It started rollout in 1978. In the late 1990s there were an estimated 25 million subscribers (in a country with a population of 60 million!).
Minitel finally got turned off in 2012.
With 'write' it was typical (if my manager in the next office was talking to an attractive customer or interviewing someone) for him to expect the "beep" that proceeds the write message soon after sitting down with my thoughts. (On Wyse 50 Green terminals...)
There's your problem.
Use an Arpanet-connected Vax running BSD Unix.
Type 'mail' at the command line, preceded by 'man mail' or asking the guy at the nearest desk if you haven't done it before.
Easy-peasy.