It occurs to be, with the advent of 2009, it is approaching twenty years since I first started using email. This began in my first week of my undergraduate degree at Exeter in the autumn of 1989, aged 18.
Here’s a bit of computing nostalgia for you…
My course was MSOR: a combination of statistics, maths, operational research and computing. We were being giving an introduction to the computing facilities for our department and, given my previous background consisted solely of ZX Spectrum (at home) and BBC micros (at school), it looked very interesting. We were all sat down at our own terminals – and I do mean terminals: single units consisting of a screen and a keyboard in a single moulded unit. The terminals were connected to the mainframe/server system via cabling throughout the room. The mainframe/server was big, noisy and in a room next door.
The lecturer began showing us how to use the system: beginning with issuing us usernames and passwords. This was actually the first time I’d had a username or password for *anything*: the closest previously must have been my bank card PIN, I suppose. After we logged in, he explained: “What you have in front of you now is a command prompt. You type stuff at the command prompt and things happen. Or not. Depends on what you type, really. Type ‘ls’ and then hit ENTER, people.” And so I typed ‘ls’ and it showed that we all had an example text file in our home directories. “Now type ‘cat example.txt’ and you’ll see the contents of the file.”
And so on.
Given the state of computing systems now, it’s a little hard to explain how new this all felt – for all of us, even those who knew a bit about computers. You didn’t have usernames or passwords or even ‘files’ on the ZX Spectrum or the BBC micro. This was a big shift in thinking, but it seemed quite intuitive.
He explained how to read files, how to copy them, rename them and edit them (commands: cat, cp, mv, edit – don’t know which editor this was). Then, in more detail he showed us how to use the editor to write out a short Pascal program, compile it, and run it. A very simple “Hello, World!” program. That, he said, was enough for us to be able to do the first couple of weeks assignments: we’d been learning Pascal in parallel with this.
And then, just as the lecture was finishing, he mentioned – almost in passing, as if it wasn’t really all that important – that we could “send each other mail” via the computers. He then proceeded to demonstrate: this was using the old-fashioned Unix ‘mail’ command, and he sent a message to one of the other students. He explained how to check for and read the received message, and his message was read back to him from the other side of the room.
This may not seem like a big deal, but to the whole group of us in 1989, this was something quite amazing. I remember thinking at the time: “I’m *so* going to use *this*”.
And that was it. My introduction to email. At that stage, we didn’t really have an email ‘address’, actually: we emailed others in our department simply by typing ‘mail USERNAME’, where USERNAME was the username of the recipient and then typed the message. However, we obviously socialised with others in other departments and those other departments had their own email systems. How could we send email to *them*? We spent a while figuring it out. This was before the days where all email address were of the form something@somewhere.co.uk – or, in the Exeter academic realm, something@department.exeter.ac.uk Over time, we figured out through a huge amount of trial and error that it *was* possible to send email between departments, but that a certain amount of black magic was required in the addressing to make it work.
For instance, emailing to Maths from my department (MSOR) might have needed an address written like: username@uk.ac.exeter.maths%gateway.msor.exeter.ac.uk for it to work. I expect that’s not quite the form we used, but you get the idea. A similarly obtuse – and not necessarily symmetrical – version would be required for a message to return in the opposite direction.
And that’s how it all kicked off. I’ve had an email address in one form or another for almost twenty years and it seems incredible how mainstream it has become.
Email. Brilliant.