The History of Electronic Mail | Hacker News Reader

The History of Electronic Mail

multicians.org

43 pointsbpierre25 comments

No history of electronic mail is complete without the stories of those who experienced it as a new thing. We often cannot understand how technology changed things - what was it like before email?

I have two stories.

I had a technical question about something and the author of the paper was in Japan. I could call or send a letter. Calling was difficult, expensive and awkward. Mail would take weeks. Then I noticed there was an email attached to the paper and on a whim, sent and email. I was stunned and bewildered to get an answer to my question less than twenty minutes later. From Japan! I just remember the feeling of staring at the reply and not really comprehending how it could be there.

Also, people started mailing lists. It was quite exciting because now there were places you could hear about other people working on the same problems. One day I got an email about a new mailing list and promptly signed up. A few minutes later I started getting tens and then hundreds of email messages about people signing up - "Yes add me to the list". Then a few minutes later, thousands of messages about "Remove me from the list". People did not understand the difference between "reply" and "reply all" or maybe the mailing list software had a bug. But it was hilarious.

My friend and I would be on the phone while we sent each other emails and we would be shocked at how instantaneously they were delivered. But now that I think about it, it is interesting to think how we weren't equally shocked that our voices were being instantly transmitted over the phone at the same time.

To be fair to you, you may not have understood how much data voice and text each took. An email can have hundreds of words sent in an instant, whereas a phone call is limited to a few words per second.

What was the email attached to the paper about? Was it notes on the paper or something?

I think they just meant the author's email address was listed on the paper.

there you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szdbKz5CyhA

Many people don't realize how hard it used to be to communicate just a few decades ago, especially across countries. Phone rates were ridiculously high (dollars per minute at times) and there was no email/IM.

When my dad went to Germany for work in the 80s, my family used the phone for urgent matters and paper letters for "long reads". Letters would take a couple of weeks to get there from South America, and a couple more weeks to come back with the answer, leading to a 4-6 week roundtrip.

A long distance phone call from across the country used to be a family event.

Heck many of my school friends were long distance because we lived on county line — I never called anybody except for very brief logistics.

You mean a "party line" ? Been there done that too.

Probably not. Just intrastate long distance within the same area code could cost as much as an (expensive) cross-country call. Phone rates were oriented towards rarely calling outside of your immediate town and its neighbors.

To some of the other comments about email, I was the chair of a non-profit board for many years. And while, everyone eventually on the board got on email, it probably took at least a decade and I recall at one point, I used an MCI service that would print out and snail mail an email to the laggards.

> I used an MCI service that would print out and snail mail an email to the laggards.

Was that before or after the USPS offered the same service ?

Don't know. This would have been early to mid-80s I think.

Sounds like almost the opposite - it sounds like they lived on the border of what would be considered a local call, so people could be geographically local but telegraphically expensive.

Yep. Pizza places would have five or six phone numbers so that everyone in their delivery area could call them on a local line and avoid toll charges.

I did the math for how much I would have spent on long distance during the pandemic if it was in 1970, it worked out to several hundred thousand dollars.

Even without going back to 1970, there's an "interesting" question of how we would have adapted to the pandemic even 20 or 25 years ago. To me, it seems fairly obvious that we couldn't reasonably have just switched to WFH for an extended period--even leaving more expensive (albeit not 1970 levels) telephony charges out of the equation. Many, maybe the majority, of people were just getting dial-up Internet in the mid- to late-90s and basically none of the Internet services we take for granted today like Amazon existed until fairly late in that period.

I have been thinking about this on-and-off since I first read this on a blog somewhere - and all I can think is that we would have regged up higher phone bills, but probably we would have had to adapt more to working not just from home, but also async and we would have been better of for it.

Probably wouldn't have saved lettering, but it would likely have made faxes far more common in peoples homes - you can't have a meeting with your boss, but you can send him an update pretty easily.

In some ways I think it was our course that we had good enough technology to do WFH, but didn't get to take advantage of that to chance how we worked.

The pandemic is a (hopefully) once in a lifetime opportunity to change and we kinda wasted it.

> Letters would take a couple of weeks to get there from South America, and a couple more weeks to come back with the answer, leading to a 4-6 week roundtrip.

If you heard that someone in your (ethnic) community was travelling (especially flying) back to the 'Old Country', the person would often be asked to take various letters during the trip to folks 'back home' (and then perhaps replies on the return).

I distinctly recall in the early 90s when I first used a government system and was able to send essentially an instant message to someone on a terminal on the other side of the global. It was quite amazing.

And then I called that person and paid 300 dollars for a 45 minute phone call.

Interesting, but as with many such history lessons, what one considers the origin of a given technology depends a lot on where one was at the time.

For email, I still consider https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... the most complete overview.

The history of email without a reference to Monty Python? How quickly we forget.

https://youtu.be/anwy2MPT5RE

Telex predates this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex

My first job in the offshore drilling industry involved a huge amount of Telex which was the primary way we communicated with rigs' shore locations. (I don't think we even had direct communications to the rigs themselves except latterly.) Basically, we (well our admins) typed up memos which were sent by in internal office mail to the communications room on the top floor which would send and receive Telexes from the various locations.

Should include telegrams.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com