[ih] question re. early adoption of email

[Larry Sheldon]

On 4/28/2016 19:47, John Levine wrote:
>> I have been led to believe that (one of) the earliest forms of "email"
>> consisted of UUCPing (or later, ftping) document files around.
>>
>> I was not there, then.
>
> I was.  There was indeed a lot of uucp mail, but it came out of the
> unix community in the late 1970s which at the time had only a small
> overlap with the Arpanet community.  All you needed was an ordinary
> dialup modem, and someone who was willing to talk to you.  Many sites
> buried the toll calls in the company's overall phone bill.  Although
> uucp is older than usenet and netnews, they took off together since
> the same uucp connection you used for your usenet fix also handled
> mail.

I used UUCP as a denizen of what might have been called (but was not) 
"social media" in the form of The WELL.

> There was a certain amount of informal leakage between Arpanet mail
> and uucp -- in the mid 1980s you could reach me at ima!johnl at cca.


-- 
"Everybody is a genius.  But if you judge a fish by
its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole
life believing that it is stupid."

--Albert Einstein

 From Larry's Cox account.