
​How to Send an Email in 1984 - ohjeez
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-send-an-email-in-1984?utm_source=mbfb
======
markc
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](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.

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eridal
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 :)

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blueintegral
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/...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/4boa6p/old_audio_datablast_for_bbc_micro_doesnt_sound/)

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SagelyGuru
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.

~~~
ci5er
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
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)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elm_\(email_client\))

~~~
ci5er
He might have had a point, but I would not want to respond to an email with
cat!

When I worked in Tokyo, all of our SunOS workstations did the BSD Unix thing,
and we got corporate email via some sort of X.400 relay over an IBM mainframe
(I think). This was before Mutt or Pine and may have been Elm or could have
been something else - I don't remember. But, it was weird, because we could
just Telnet into our compadre's SunOS boxes in the US directly (dedicated
line). I don't know what the rationale behind this "split" was, but whenever
we called corporate IT about email being down - they would always say: "What's
email?". They must have used a different word for their X.400 batch messaging
system.

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Aardwolf
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

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

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throwaway2016a
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.

~~~
christiangenco
Is there anyone here that knows how to decode it?

~~~
stevetrewick
> _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](http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/361588.html)

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mxuribe
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
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.

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coldcode
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
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.

~~~
NikolaeVarius
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.

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

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

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

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DanBC
The modem is a Miracle Technology WS2000.
[http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/13614/Miracle-
Technol...](http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/13614/Miracle-Technology-
Modem-WS2000/)

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

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

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

~~~
stevetrewick
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.

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sharkweek
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...

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

~~~
semi-extrinsic
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
Originally stylized as HoTMaiL, the capitals spelling out HTML! :)

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kazinator
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
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel)

------
gist
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...)

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ryanmccullagh
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.

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Samantha1989
I probably use a computer for everything BUT keeping track of what's in my
freezer. Good idea though.

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

~~~
Lapis_01
haha, yea me too.

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B1FF_PSUVM
> 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.

