Book People Archive

Mail, past and present

Folks interested in the early history of email-- which predates the
ARPAnet by a number of years-- may be interested in this account
from one of its early implementors, Tom Van Vleck:

   http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html

He talks about the mainframe email program he developed in 1965, as
well as some of the other early mail and mail-like programs that were
developed in the 1960s and early 1970s.

It's fairly clear from his account that mail was a popular application
right from the get-go, with a broad base of users.  Most of them
had little idea of how exactly email worked-- the author mentions
that there were only a few people who knew how to implement it right--
and if users were anything like they are today, few of them had much
idea of exactly what systems and networks the mail traversed.  There's
still a lot of people for whom the Net is basically magic, and even
people familiar with the Net but who aren't immersed in IT development
aren't always entirely clear on how messages go from place to place.
(And until relatively recently, it was much harder to understand, with
a patchwork of various local and global mail systems.  I think I
finally took the BITNET and UUCP mail routings out of my email signature
in the early 1990s.)

So I don't find unusual that some non-programmer early users of online
communication systems might not get all the details of their use exactly
right, especially after a fair bit of time has passed.  Which is not to
say there's no value in historians of the Net pressing to nail down
exact details.  But personally, I find the social impact of email more
interesting than the technical aspects.   It's really the first application
that showed the potential of online communication as a democratizing force.
And that concept was one of the things that sparked the interest in making
books freely available online.

And it's one reason why I'm still fond of email lists as a way of talking
together, despite it being rather "old school" by some measures, in world
where the hot media are blogs, wikis, and other newer inventions.

I hope you all find it a useful way to communicate and collaborate,
and contribute to the ongoing work of making books and other knowledge
widely available.  With this post, I go offline for vacation, and the
list will go quiet (unless I see a need to sign on and put posts through
while I'm away, but I'm trying to resist that).   I look forward to seeing
you all again (virtually) in a couple of weeks.

John