I found back one of my earliest mail messages: it is dated back in februari 1989.
Wow – ain’t search engines nice!
Today, messages like those seem totally irrelevant.
But back then, getting in touch with other people through email could be a real challenge.
The internet was forming (out of UUNET, DECnet, BITNET, Usenet, EARN, ARPANET and others), and not everything was completely interconnected yet, let alone connected on-line 24/7.
For instance, newsgroups were limited to the usenet portion of the internet, and not available on the bitnet portion.
So, mail and mailing lists were the prevalent means of communication: LISTSERV was the first program facilitating mailing lists.
Routing mail could be a challenge as well.
There was not yet such a widespread thing as SMTP or POP3 as it is today.
So mail got relayed (in fact open mail relays were the standard configuration), and often you had to provide the routing instructions in your mail as well.
Hence the complicated mail addresses used in the message linked above.
Back then, on the for sending mail on the on the VAX/VMS I was working on, gMail (note the spelling) was a very good mail program that would magically do most of the routing for you.
BITNIC used to be a repository to download information and programs.
UUENCODE one of the early encoding schemes to send binaries over email (and still one of Microsoft’s email programs barfs when you put ‘begin 664′ at the beginning of a line).
BITNET Relay was one of the earliest chat programs (much like IRC now), and HEARN the mean node in The Netherlands.
History is fun!
–jeroen
Zaterdag was de jaarlijkse KatwijkBinse Truckrun: een evenement waar gehandicapte mensen als bijrijder in een Truck (97 stuks!) of Bus (3 stuks) een rit van ongeveer 4.5 uur mee mogen maken.
