No history of electronic mail is complete without the stories of those who experienced it as a new thing. We often cannot understand how technology changed things - what was it like before email?<p>I have two stories.<p>I had a technical question about something and the author of the paper was in Japan. I could call or send a letter. Calling was difficult, expensive and awkward. Mail would take weeks. Then I noticed there was an email attached to the paper and on a whim, sent and email. I was stunned and bewildered to get an answer to my question less than twenty minutes later. From Japan! I just remember the feeling of staring at the reply and not really comprehending how it could be there.<p>Also, people started mailing lists. It was quite exciting because now there were places you could hear about other people working on the same problems. One day I got an email about a new mailing list and promptly signed up. A few minutes later I started getting tens and then hundreds of email messages about people signing up - "Yes add me to the list". Then a few minutes later, thousands of messages about "Remove me from the list". People did not understand the difference between "reply" and "reply all" or maybe the mailing list software had a bug. But it was hilarious.
Many people don't realize how hard it used to be to communicate just a few decades ago, especially across countries. Phone rates were ridiculously high (dollars per minute at times) and there was no email/IM.<p>When my dad went to Germany for work in the 80s, my family used the phone for urgent matters and paper letters for "long reads". Letters would take a couple of weeks to get there from South America, and a couple more weeks to come back with the answer, leading to a 4-6 week roundtrip.
Interesting, but as with many such history lessons, what one considers the origin of a given technology depends <i>a lot</i> on where one was at the time.<p>For email, I still consider <a href="https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2022/08/102806104-05-01-acc.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...</a> the most complete overview.
The history of email without a reference to Monty Python? How quickly we forget.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/anwy2MPT5RE" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/anwy2MPT5RE</a>