You've got mail!

August 18, 2022 6:07 PM

Are you looking for a definitive timeline on the history of email, along with references? Here you go.
posted by Runes (12 comments total)

That jerk who claims he invented it (not mentioning name lest he google it and appear) appearing in 3, 2…

Seriously though, this is good. I remember my first Internet email address in 1988 and all the cool stuff it brought me into a larger world.
posted by mephron at 6:28 PM on August 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

Subject: Interesting!

Is this available as a 1/n twitter thread, and if so can someone mefimail me an unroller link?

Thanks,
Riki

> ...
posted by Riki tiki at 7:14 PM on August 18, 2022

Was there really nothing innovative about Mail-11 (the mail program that ran over DECNET)? I couldn't easily find any mention of it in the document.
posted by Johnny Quaternion at 7:32 PM on August 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

You've got mail!

...pattern baldness!

(shamelessly stolen from MST3K)
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:45 PM on August 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Eudora! I remember you. And Compuserv. ICQ and AIM. Now get these TikTokers off my lawn!
posted by nostrada at 8:22 PM on August 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

Missing the Pantelegraph.
posted by pompomtom at 10:00 PM on August 18, 2022

(Ha, I'm wrong... but it's not in the summary...)
posted by pompomtom at 10:01 PM on August 18, 2022

Wow this is a great historical document. I think it's remarkable the primary author is Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler who is apparently a very productive age 91 right now. In the 1970s she was the principal investigator running one of the first ARPANET nodes at SRI.

Fun to see Multics represented well here. That was a highly influential early multiuser operating system, particularly for its cultural impact. Unix was developed in part as a Multics clone / evolution; its name is a pun.
posted by Nelson at 7:46 AM on August 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

Sometime in the early 1990s there was a book where they essentially just scraped all of Usenet and created a "phone book" of email addresses -- and I was in it! A real book! With my name and my college-assigned email address! I wish I could find a copy of it now.
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:17 AM on August 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

Wow AzraelBrown, I have no memory of that. Can't find it with a quick search either but Google is so bad at historical records now that doesn't mean anything. Would be interesting to find that.

Another early database from that era is the UUCP maps which showed how the original UUCP nodes were interconnected. Also the Arbitron reports of Usenet group readership. I started working on collecting the latter but didn't get very far.
posted by Nelson at 9:38 AM on August 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Nelson: I'm pretty sure this is it, or some revision of it. It shows up in a lot of the book cataloging websites, but I can't find the contents anywhere. I saw it for sale at a computer store (remember when you had to buy a book to know stuff about software?) and I want to say it was like $50 (a lot for the time).
posted by AzraelBrown at 11:15 AM on August 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Was there really nothing innovative about Mail-11 (the mail program that ran over DECNET)?

That's my biggest problem with this article, which ignores most everything not on the CTSS > Multics > Unix pathway (with a side order of ARPANET), unless an innovation somewhere else was really ahead of its time.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 11:13 PM on August 19, 2022