[ih] MAP & BBN

[Bill Ricker]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 11:24 PM, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net
> wrote:

> One thing that always surprises me is that folks don't consider TELEX or
> TWX as an early form of electronic mail.  As I recall, in its later days,
> there was both inter-exchange routing and store-and-forward service.
>  Granted that Western Union and AUTODIN were sort of "the enemy" in the
> early days of the ARPANET, but still....
>

A key distinction for most folk is email is typically person to person,
whereas TELEX/TWX was station to station, firm to firm, battalion to
division; operators at the far end delivered to the addressed person (or to
in-tray of addressed Desk ).  The Mailbox person at site naming made email
personal as opposed to organizational.

A very different view would be that  computer scientists consider email to
be a service of a general purpose computing system; a separate
infrastructure without an associated computing utility is a something else
entierrly, outside our field of discourse, and of no interest.

Had the purpose of the D/ARPANET to create a follow-on to AUTODIN - which
it eventually did, after a fashion - email would have been very different
had it been designed for C2 desk-to-desk uses (latterly C3I, C4, ...)
instead of researchers eating their own dog food by scratching their own
itch for person-to-person uses.

But you are correct that TELEX/TWX/Autodin, and the WesternUnion
bicyclist/telegraphic hybid network, and Marconi radiograms were all a
prior art that may have and should have informed early email development
even if it was called 'mail'. Perhaps Tom van Vleck will comment.

-- 
Bill
@n1vux bill.n1vux at gmail.com
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