How to Send an Email in 1984

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-send-an-email-in-1984?utm_source=mbfb

by ohjeez • 10 years ago

88 47 10 years ago

motherboard.vice.com

sharkweek• 10 years ago

I remember in 4th grade (think early/mid 90s) I had a teacher who picked me and one other student to be a part of an experimental "internet" pilot for the school's computer classes. I remember having my mind blown by the first email I sent. I couldn't believe what I was seeing when my teacher was explaining that this little note was going to be delivered to another computer across the US.

Then I think I went back to playing Zany Golf...

TurboHaskal• 10 years ago

Ouch. Expected an article on current issues with privacy and references to Orwell's work.

Lapis_01• 10 years ago

haha, yea me too.

sfeng• 10 years ago

Here's a longer writeup on the History of Email: https://eager.io/blog/history-of-email/

coldcode• 10 years ago

I got my first email address in 1984, my boss and I got one on a local newspaper bulletin board. Only people we could email was each other. The only other emailing people were the execs who had some terminal based system - but their "secretaries" printed the emails and the execs dictated the responses.

dexterdog• 10 years ago

I worked for a VP at Merrill in 1996 who was still printing and filing every email he received and sent. He was in charge of a fairly large tech team in the company.

sebtoast• 10 years ago

I had two sales rep still doing that in 2010, both are now retired.

NikolaeVarius• 10 years ago

After having worked for a large corporation, I can confirm even in the modern era, having hard copies of emails can ensure "shenanigans" happens much less.

vidarh• 10 years ago

'93 here, via a BBS that exchanged e-mail via UUCP via an upstream BBS 4 times a day. It was how I got my first web access: Cern had an email<->web gateway that you could e-mail a URL and get a plaintext "rendered" web page back. It was extremely frustrating when the page I got back linked elsewhere for the information I wanted, and I had to wait for the next UUCP exchange to get the next batch of pages back.

Otherwise it felt a lot more "civilized" than Prestel - still only a 2400bps modem at first, but a variety of "offline readers" with fairly decent UIs, like Thor (Amiga) and terminal programs like Ncomm (also Amiga) that allowed heavily scripted exchanges with the BBSs to automate message exchanges and file up/downloads.

But once I got a direct internet connection at university it only took months before I pretty much stopped calling BBSs - it's amazing (and a bit sad) how quick the decline was, even though some survived for quite a while via telnet.

ghaff2• 10 years ago

allowed heavily scripted exchanges with the BBSs to automate message exchanges and file up/downloads.

As I recall, Qmail was the one I used--mostly with a commercial PC-Board system in a nearby city. People forget that even intrastate telephone calls could be pretty pricey on a per minute basis through at least the first part of the 1990s so it made a lot of sense to login, download/upload, logoff, and read/respond locally.

A number of the bigger BBSs survived for a time as dial-up ISPs before broadband became common. I don't really remember when I stopped using them. Probably sometime in the mid-nineties.

Aardwolf2• 10 years ago

Such concern for security... visibly typing the password 1234 in front of TV. That part really looks like British comedy with Moss from IT Crowd

DanBC2• 10 years ago

...but at 3:30 they've blanked out what seems to be a postal address. (From the size of it.)

_nalply• 10 years ago

I think they changed the password before and after the show.

Biganon• 10 years ago

When he said "bye Jane" at the end, I really saw Moss saying "hi Jen" and waving

DanBC2• 10 years ago

The modem is a Miracle Technology WS2000. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/13614/Miracle-Technol...

They have it switched to "1200Rx-75Tx VIEWTEXT" and "1200".

£129 in 1984 is roughly £390 today, according to http://inflation.stephenmorley.org/

Has anyone converted that audio into BBC software? What was it?

stevetrewick3• 10 years ago

Ugh, manual switches! Should have sprung the extra for a Hayes Smartmodem 1200. Bet he just liked it because he got to twiddle the knobs.

I never managed to load the software (because our TV didn't have an audio jack and I just stuck a tape recorder up to the speaker exactly as the nice lady suggested we not do) and I didn't know anyone who did, but I've left a link to a recent demodulation from that very video up thread.

throwaway2016a• 10 years ago

I think one of the cooler parts is at the end they transmit software to their listeners using tones and tell you to put the auto out from your TV into your computer.

pmiller2• 10 years ago

Yeah. I'd like to know what that software does. :)

kilroy123• 10 years ago

I agree, that's very cool. How successful was that kind of "download", I wonder?

stevetrewick3• 10 years ago

Not very AFAICT, partly because audio out was relatively uncommon, never knew anyone who got it to load and they stopped doing it after the first series IIRC. Great bit of nostalgia.

christiangenco• 10 years ago

Is there anyone here that knows how to decode it?

stevetrewick3• 10 years ago

At first I tried to load these files into BeebEm. The trouble is that BeebEm doesn't take .wav files directly-- you have to convert them to a format called .uef-- and the conversion programs were reallyt finicky with noisy signals. And this signla is very noisy, having been transmitted over UHF, recorded on home video, and then digitised. In the end, I ended up writing my own demodulator

http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/361588.html

mxuribe• 10 years ago

I remember getting my first email address in 1992; my first semester of college. It was the one issued to me by the university; and that also happened to be my first exposure to unix! Ah, nostalgia!

wahern• 10 years ago

My first e-mail address was also from a university account, sometime in 1995, IIRC. By then the University of West Florida was _already_ using Linux for SLIP/PPP and shell accounts.

They were probably using Slackware because JOE is still my preferred editor, and JOE was the default $EDITOR on Slackware.

The class was a distance-learning class in Special Relativity. Class discussion occurred in a local Usenet newsgroup using TIN over a dial-up shell account as the default reader. I still use Usenet (many comp.* groups are still active and constructive) and TIN is still my preferred reader, though for a few years I was using Forte Agent.

_lce0• 10 years ago

Aww The last part, the one in which they transmit software encoded as sounds is such invitation to hack!!

I wish to have the time! or to be Saturday -- is not fair to post this on a Monday :)

sucrose• 10 years ago

First messaging system I used was in 1998 on the elementary school's computers. It was called P-Mail/Pegasus Mail.

gnud• 10 years ago

Still exists - http://www.pmail.com/

semi-extrinsic• 10 years ago

In '96 (or around there) I heard from some of the older kids about this new cool thing called "Hotmail" (pre-Microsoft). Also remember the horror when one of my friends misspelled "mail" as "male" when typing it into AltaVista...

richev• 10 years ago

Originally stylized as HoTMaiL, the capitals spelling out HTML! :)

kazinator2• 10 years ago

By 1998, household internet had been a "thing" for several years. You could get a normal Internet e-mail account from an ISP.

gist• 10 years ago

Email and Unix "write" on a company system that I setup in 1986.

With 'write' it was typical (if my manager in the next office was talking to an attractive customer or interviewing someone) for him to expect the "beep" that proceeds the write message soon after sitting down with my thoughts. (On Wyse 50 Green terminals...)

SagelyGuru• 10 years ago

I was routinely sending emails well before 1984, through my university. In many ways it worked better than nowadays because there were no spammers, then.

savanaly• 10 years ago

Can't remember the last time I saw any promotional material in my email that I didn't sign up for myself, gmail is very good at filtering it out. I would say email is better nowadays if only because you can contact most people and organizations through it. The bigger the network, the more useful the service.

milesokeefe• 10 years ago

The bigger the network, the more useful the service.

With many services, after a certain size you begin to need tools to curate the content on the network, separate signal from noise, etc. But in a perfect world these could be handled and I think your statement would remain true.

For example, most forums begin with a small, dedicated user base that mostly knows each other and act in good will, but as the userbase grows all of these aspects fade as the Eternal September/tragedy of the commons effects take place. It's easy to see with the progression of subreddits for example, since they are created so often and can grow to very high subscribed counts, you get to see this pattern repeat pretty often.

ci5er2• 10 years ago

The traffic was pretty light by today's standards. I was able to "run" half or more of two and a half states' (in the Rocky Mountain region) worth of UUCP/email traffic on a TrailBlazer 9600 baud modem hanging off of a refurbished PDP-11 that took up an uncomfortably large portion of my bedroom. It even kept up with almost all of Usenet, if I didn't have to use my phone line for some other more personally urgent business.

If you were a user sending emails via a terminal session, I could see it as being considered "better", but if you were the sysadmin keeping (say) the Vaxen alive and "fair and balanced", it could be a non-trivial amount of work!

ams6110• 10 years ago

I started out on email about 1984/85, using the 'mail' utility on Unix at school. They rolled out Elm[1] shortly thereafter and it caused something of a sensation.

I do remember one of the profs grousing that "if you can't read your email with 'cat' then you are subscribed to too many email lists."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elm_(email_client)

Aardwolf2• 10 years ago

Yay, there are more videos like these from the same youtube account!

E.g. trying a portable modem on a payphone in a train and a hotel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5OlzonbgC0&t=0s

And, similarly, typing account number and password visibly on TV

blueintegral• 10 years ago

I spent a little time trying to extract the program from the audio at the end of this video, but it turns out someone had already done it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/4boa6p/...

Samantha1989• 10 years ago

I probably use a computer for everything BUT keeping track of what's in my freezer. Good idea though.

B1FF_PSUVM• 10 years ago

using the Prestel system.

There's your problem.

Use an Arpanet-connected Vax running BSD Unix.

Type 'mail' at the command line, preceded by 'man mail' or asking the guy at the nearest desk if you haven't done it before.

Easy-peasy.

ryanmccullagh• 10 years ago

I'm fascinated by the history of packet switching networks and the history of the Internet. I can't remember the first email I sent, but I believe my first email account was with the AOL system. My first PC was a Windows 95 machine, with the AOL program that had an integrated browser and chat system.

kazinator2• 10 years ago

Never heard of Prestel (or perhaps long forgot about it). In 1984 you could to any one of a large number of free dial-up bulletin-board systems, some of which were connected to a message forwarding network known as FidoNET. Also, for way than $16K per year, you could go to some state-sponsored university and get a real e-mail account. :) People weren't such early home computer users by 1984. Many computers usable for dial-up BBSing were affordable, going down into the couple hundred dollars range. Commodore 64's, Ataris and so on. Apple II boxes were pricey, but the clones not as much.

david-given• 10 years ago

Prestel was a UK service; asymmetric 1200/75 using a Videotext client. It predated Fidonet by about five years.

Prestel was big in the UK partly because the ubiquitous BBC Micro had a Videotext chip in it, so a modem made a very obvious upgrade if you had one. But you could also get standalone terminals. Never saw one myself.

France, by the way, had an equivalent system, but which was hugely more popular: Minitel. It was technically very similar to Prestel (it may even have used the same protocols and videotext chip, but I can't find a reference). It started rollout in 1978. In the late 1990s there were an estimated 25 million subscribers (in a country with a population of 60 million!).

Minitel finally got turned off in 2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

markc• 10 years ago

I think I sent my first email in 1981 from a Digital Equipment VAX/VMS system on DECNET. Internal to DEC you'd use :: between hops. e.g. MYVAX::YOURVAX.

Outside, UUCP paths were used. Example: Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!rms@mit-prep (example from an RMS newsgroup post: http://tech-insider.org/free-software/research/1985/0610.htm)

And you'd reverse the host order to send mail in the other direction!

I remember sending almost everything through decvax!decwrl!mit-eddie when communicating with the outside world from DEC.

Frankly getting the routing right was a big pain in the ass. You'd sometimes have to try sending the message a bunch of times as you try to get the route spec just right.

Even so, email was pretty great. It was also very much "old hat" when the world finally got exited about it in the 90's.

​How to Send an Email in 1984

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How to Send an Email in 1984