How to send an 'e mail' (1984) [video] | Hacker News Reader

How to send an 'e mail' (1984) [video]

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If curious, some past threads:

How to send an 'E mail' (1984) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23978397 - July 2020 (1 comment)

How to Send an Email (1984) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22595154 - March 2020 (1 comment)

How to Send an Email in 1984 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12628019 - Oct 2016 (47 comments)

How to Send an Email in 1984 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11280242 - March 2016 (1 comment)

"It's very simple really"

plugs around various cables, switches on things, logs on, starts rotating dial and anxiously looks at camera

"So it's a very simple connection to make"

"Extremely simple"

It’s like your first day of calculus and the instructor talking about the final exam saying, yes it’s extremely simple. Yes, of course, after you learn everything and do it daily, yes, then it’s simple.

This exemplifies why some technologists failed. They’re “simple” once you get the pattern down, but it’s hard for anyone unfamiliar.

Funny. I started at UCI in 1985 where they gave every student an email. 36 years later, the same exact email address still works. In fact, I think 1984 was one of the first years that email addresses standardized on the "natural" format everyone sees and uses today. We used the MH mail system that was developed at RAND and later adopted as an open source project there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System

He proceeds to enter his password as 12345... (at 1:21)

The more things change the more they stay the same

I believe it's 1234.

Wow great video!

I've recently been watching Look Around You and I have to assume that season 2 was directly inspired by this clip, the similarity is uncanny.

An example: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7t2yhw

I see "1234" was a popular password in 1984 as well.

Hey! That’s the password on my luggage

11111 was the password used for prince Philips demo account that got hacked in the infamous incident.

I just finished reading the book "The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal". Very highly recommended for anyone interested in the early days of computing and the internet and the people that helped make it happen.

Another good book is 'The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture' by Brian Dear.

It dates (1960s, 1970s) even before the Licklider book I think. Read the blurb, sounds amazing the things they had back then.

At the end of the video, there's a software transmission!

I downloaded the audio and converted it to .wav. Made it mono, extracted the end, and saved as unsigned 8bits PCM. Now trying to figure out what the hell to do with it! Any pointers appreciated :)

Use MakeUEF to convert from .wav to .uef, and you can then load that into a BBC Micro emulator.

Thanks, I was missing knowledge about that file format!

https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/4boa6p/...

thanks!

Another example showing looking up airport information or booking theatre tickets or downloading a file via prestel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq53DO7zL_g

Just push this button here :)

I actually spent some time yesterday pushing buttons and sending emails, in a language that's as old as the video.

https://github.com/codr7/emash

Interesting that he wasn't dialing the 618 short code we had - though Oftel did at some stage ake us stop using that.

I actually used to use to dial the x.25 service to login from home using a portable terminal - no screen just paper.

ordering pizza via computer, about a decade earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94d_h_t2QAA

It's easy to romanticise the early days of the internet but seeing this brought a tinge of depression.

"E" mail? that will never take off. Next you'll be making currency out of just electricity.

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