[ih] The Atlantic on Email

[Joly MacFie]

A new article on email replacements notes the protocol's resiliency, and
quotes Zittrain:  “Email is the last great unowned technology,” said the
Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain in an episode of the podcast
Codebreaker <http://codebreaker.codes/> in November, “and by unowned, I
mean there is no CEO of email... it’s just a shared hallucination that
works.”

There is a potted history included:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-comes-after-email/422625/


The computer engineer Raymond Tomlinson sent the first email in 1971. He
can’t remember what it said, but people keep asking him anyway. “It was
completely ephemeral, so any trace of it is gone,” he said. “There may be a
machine that has some memory that was hooked up at the time, but you’d
never be able to find it.”
Back then, Tomlinson was developing applications and protocols for the
ARPANET, the early network that today’s Internet is based on.*
<http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-comes-after-email/422625/#footnote>
(Today,
he’s a principal scientist at BBN Technologies, a research and development
arm of the defense giant Raytheon.) In 1971, the idea that anyone other
than Tomlinson’s coworkers would want to use email was out of the question.
“The computer was not personal,” Tomlinson said. “It was time-shared
amongst several dozen users. Most computers were quite expensive—tens if
not hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Email arrived at a time before mobile phones, when it was much harder to
reach someone who wasn’t right there with you. “Getting ahold of people,
especially those in other time zones, was very difficult,” Tomlinson said.
“If they didn't answer the telephone, if you were lucky, maybe they had a
secretary—or an answering service if they were really important.”
In building apps for the ARPANET, Tomlinson and his colleagues had talked
about some sort of mailbox protocol. One idea was to establish numbered
electronic mailboxes so that messages could be printed out then
hand-delivered to cubbies with the corresponding numbers. “I looked at that
and said, ‘Well, it’s an interesting idea, but it’s way too complicated,’”
Tomlinson told me. A simpler method, he thought, would be address messages
to individuals. Though the goal was to be able to communicate with
engineers working on the ARPANET at other universities, the first email
Tomlinson sent was from one computer to another, both standing “literally
side by side” in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, lab.
Between the roar of the computers and the whir of the air conditioner
required to cool them down, the room was noisy. And the machine Tomlinson
used to hit send barely resembled today’s computers. “Brace yourself for a
sharp turn,” Tomlinson told me, “There was no monitor.”
Instead, he used a beige terminal the size of a large typewriter, without a
mouse or trackpad, for inputting instructions. The terminal itself was
something like a Teletype Model 33 KSR, and it was hooked up to a printer
that spit out 10 characters per second, all capital letters.
Which means: The first email had to be printed out in order to be read.
Tomlinson’s the one who selected the @ symbol for email addresses, and it
stuck—despite a brief period in the 1980s when some service providers
experimented with exclamation points and percent signs instead.
In the early days, checking email required a person to log onto a computer
and use the keyboard to enter a “type mailbox” command. “The mailbox was
just a file and the type command typed the contents of the file onto the
paper in the terminal,” Tomlinson said. “Some systems would check the
user’s mailbox after they logged in, and if it was not empty, a message
like, ‘YOU HAVE MAIL,’ would be printed.” A separate program had to be used
to compose outgoing messages, before inbox-outbox functionalities were
eventually integrated. “By the end of the 1970s, most of the features of
email we take for granted were present,” Tomlinson said.
At first, email was useful, but it wasn’t widely used—it would be decades
before electronic mail entered the mainstream. In the 1980s, early adopters
flocked to networked services like CompuServe and Prodigy, both of which
offered email access, though not necessarily as a central feature. Tim
Berners-Lee outlined his idea for the World Wide Web in 1989 at a time when
most adults in the United States didn’t own a personal computer. That
quickly changed.

By 1995, about one-third of Americans owned computers and 14 percent of
them reported having a home Internet connection—mostly sluggish dial-up. As
Internet adoption steadily climbed, email became its cultural touchstone,
and the inbox became a phenomenon. “If you don’t have an Internet address,”
a then-37-year-old New Jersey man told *The New York Times*
<http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/19/business/getting-down-to-business-on-the-net.html?pagewanted=4>
in
1994, referring to email, “it marks you as a nobody, as someone who’s over
40. It’s reaching the point that you get socially ostracized.”

America Online, the company that helped millions of Americans explore the
web for the first time, was built around the experience of checking mail.
Which meant that for millions of people, the experience of going online,
from the very beginning, was fundamentally about checking your email. By
1997, electronic mail crept into workplaces and across college campuses.
Email became a central plot device in the romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail”
in 1998, and was the subject of the Britney Spears song “Email My Heart” in
1999.

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Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
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