I have a fuzzy memory of the first time I sent an e-mail. It was March of 1977. I was working on my second B.A., this time in Computer Science because my first bachelor’s degree in Psychology was like a firecracker that goes “pffft” instead of the bigger bang I was hoping for. I think I thought I was going to become a sex therapist but I’m the kind of guy who brings his work home with him so it was all to the good I completed that segue.
I was lucky to get a part-time job at the Special Interactive Computation Laboratory or SICL, better known as the graphics lab at the University of Minnesota. I was given an assignment to check out the new PDP-11/40, a computer that used this new operating system called UNIX. It had an e-mail program called; wait for it, “mail”. Doug McIlroy (an early UNIX programmer who wrote an early spell checker and other software) says “Electronic mail was there from the start.” The start in this case is no later than 1971. I’m sure that whatever I wrote it wasn’t very profound. And if I thought there was a future for e-mail I had low expectations. I’m horrible at predicting the future. I didn’t think cell phones would be a big deal either. Citizen’s Band Radio, eToys, and bubble memory – those were going to be big!
Of course you know what happened to e-mail. It became so ubiquitous that we need a new word for ubiquity. Why? “…99% of the time, if you’re sending a message to a human you don’t know well, you’re using e-mail,” according to Stewart Butterfield (co-founder of Flickr).
Sarah Jessica Parker has a particular attitude about e-mail that is shared by many. “I don’t believe in email…I prefer calling and hanging up.” I’m sure my first e-mail didn’t inspire such comments. The only people I could send e-mail to were those who would later use the same computer – that was maybe 2 fellow programmers.
Later there would be other firsts. First e-mail with romantic intent hacked by another colleague; first e-mail mistakenly replied to all; first e-mail from a foreign prince who needs $50 from me and only me; first script written to prevent duplicate e-mail addresses; first e-mail received from my own company trying to trick me into falling for a phishing scam. And the first time I had to use instant messaging because e-mail, you know, is just too damn slow!
