Raise your hand if you remember the time before e-mail existed

yeah, yeah and yeah.

i can remember a time before i'd *heard of* email, and i'm 26.

Yes I do, Yes myspace, no facebook. Myspace and facebook are no substitute for email and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

yeah, no, no

y/n/n as well

Yes, yes, and yes. I also have a blog and so do loads of my similarly age-themed friends.

I can still remember the first time I emailed anyone. My friend, who was doing his doctorate in Engineering, brought me into the lab where he was working and let me send an electronic mail, a couple of hundred characters at a time, to my boyfriend in Oxford. I think it was 1991. I feared that I would asphyxiate.

yny

yes, and not anymore x2.
I remember in tenth grade computer studies/typing class we could "email" anyone in the room. it wasn't email as we know it, but it was a glimpse of something. I remember thinking, in 1992, that I would never EVER need the skills I was learning in typing class. It's probably the only thing I'm glad I learned in high school.

I'm not sure what my first email app was - it probably was the unix Pine thing they had at university.

yyn

I was on that cusp of technology. started college with a typewriter, ended college spending all-nighters on the school's computers in the library, but nobody had any computers of their own yet.

My mom works for the US forest service, so she had e-mail before practically anyone. i was living abroad, and it was so great to be able to e-mail her from the one connected computer at the translation agency. I would stay after hours to use the computer to send e-mails. I remember going on the Internet, and staring for interminable minutes watching the netscpe globe spin around waiting for pages to load.

i also remember when my brother got a walkman and was the first one in our school to have one.

It played cassettes of course.

i remember the first time i even heard the word "email". yes myspace no facebook, don't really want either. gig promoters pls stop using your myspace like it's the only way to fucking communicate, you are very irritating.

Yes no yes.

In my final year at school we went on a trip to an internet café so that people could use the WWW for the first time. That was early 1997.

Of course, I'm 34 and not (yet completely) senile. I can't remember when I heard about it the first time. Must have been in my early twenties. Decided quite quickly - after hearing about the internet - that I wanted to k now more about it and got a .... Compuserve account. I think I actually saved some of those first emails for a couple of years. Dear lord. I thought it was "magical" maybe?

No Myspace account anymore. I do have a FB profile. Hurrah!

I also remember the first walkmen (is that how you would say it in plural, Nabisco?).

I'm not sure what my first email app was - it probably was the unix Pine thing they had at university.

Which universith did you attend, Stan? RUG or UFSIA? My husband also mentioned it once, how he would get on the net and also email.

Does anyone remember if they thought "email" was an annoying word, just like "blogosphere" now?

(xpost: RUG)

Interesting, I sort of suspected that no one above a certain age would have a facebook account, but I've already been proven wrong (although maybe some of you have job affiliations with schools or are recent grad school grads and that's why).

Yes, yes and no. But I tried - I couldn't really get excited about it. What's so great about it? This is a serious question.

I remember a time before personal computers. I have myspace and facebook log-ins, but I wouldn't call them active accounts. I got a Bebo too.

Yes, back in 1995 I bought a PC for business use, it was £1000 and was 'multimedia' with a dialup modem 9600 and a 600MB hard disc drive.

Should have sued for misdescription really.

I remember first day plugging it in, and d/l some pictures from the Reading Festival that was on that very day (we'd been), and only having to wait 20 minutes to get each one!

xpost whatever your 'certain age' is, I bey I'm above it.

Yes, yes, no.

My first experience of wonder at email's powers was when I ordered (via email) the sub pop catalogue online and it arrived in my inbox within minutes. From Seattle! Can you believe it?

Your order arrived within ten minutes? Woha, those werd the good days.

Stan: At first I misread email for émail (enamel in dutch). Then it switched around, so whenever i saw the word émail, I would think: hmm so what's yer frigging address ey?

Blogosphere isn't that bad.

xxpost
Aside from the gigs aspect of myspace, I don't know what's so great about them either, especially if you don't know anyone there IRL.

(and I don't even know what a Bebo is)

MySpace I hate, but Facebook is sorta fun. You can write on someone's Wall, throw food at'em,... Check out groups. SHit like that.

But you have to join before you can even see what it looks like. Too much bother for me.

I first sent email on my second day at university, drunk. That was 1996. I have a myspace (moribund) and facebook (active). My boss lays claim to being the oldest person on Facebook, I believe.

we did have email at university ('86) but nobody used it. could email friends at uni in oxford (using email addresses containing, i think, exclamation marks) but didn't bother past the initial 'i have email' emails.

("In the original UUCP environment, the prevalent form was path!host!user, for which path described a sequence of hosts the message had to travel through before reaching the destination host. This construct is called the bang path notation, because an exclamation mark is colloquially called a “bang.” Today, many UUCP-based networks have adopted RFC-822 and understand domain-based addresses.")

first email i had at work was an x400 style address. but for the first few years we only ever had wyse50 green screen monitors, not pcs.

yes, no and no

I remember pre-email days and I do have a myspace account. facebook seems like a big bother to me, however.

I remember when the internet was just words - no images- and I thought it was the most techically awesome thing I had ever seen.

But you have to join before you can even see what it looks like. Too much bother for me.

Can't you get a "guided tour"? I think you can actually. It's much nicer looking than MS.

I didn't use the internet until '97 (aged 17), email til a year later and only bothered getting a non-uni email upon finishing in 2001. Looks like I'm the frontrunner in the technospaz stakes so far

Oh and my answers are YYN

Friend of mine had one YONKS ago but she worked for Microsoft (I think). Her husband must have had one even sooner: he co-designed the first Apple Classic.

My memory is so bad that I can't remember how old I was at the time. I am 34 now, and my university had just installed five workstations with this new "internet" we had heard so much about. I was early 20's.

Can Facebook do anything that MySpace can't? or is the appeal that there are not porn stars and kid bands jocking you every five minutes?

is it like Friendster was?

"no way am i getting 'e-mail' - sounds stupid, like techno music or something"

Yes, it can do something that MS can't: not get on my nerves.

Yes, and yes, I'm on Facebook (and LJ)...

Ew. Louis J?

of course I remember, that's like half my adult life. or more. no to the other q's tho I "experimented" on myspace for awhile last year.

Email has existed since the 60s, right? I first heard of it in late 1991, when I was in my first term at university. A computer science student I was sharing a flat with was going on about it.

I started using it myself some time later that academic year, I guess. We called it pmail though, because that was the DOS name for Pegasus Mail, which was our university's mail client. We only used it for internal mail, though. I don't think I really knew we were able to route mail outside of the university. Sending it outside of our department seemed exotic enough. I wouldn't have had anyone to send it to anyway. I seem to remember learning something later on at uni about how there were two competing standards for email addressing, one of which had the domains in the opposite order to the way we are used to now. So you'd be j✧✧.blo✧✧✧@u✧.a✧.universityn✧✧✧ in one of them.

Anyway, I think I sent my first email via the internet after I graduated, in the 1994-5 year, same time as when I discovered the web.

Yes, I do social networking.

Someone said recently that if you can remember a time before the internet, you'll never really get Web 2.0, even if you think you do, cause it's not wired into your lifeforce, or some such.

✧✧✧.blo✧✧✧@universityn✧✧✧.a✧.u✧ that should read. I have no idea what happened to some of the characters there. Computers!

Oh, it must be a nu-ILX privacy thing.

i can remember a time before i'd heard of email too, and i don't have myspace or facebook

if you can remember a time before the internet, you'll never really get Web 2.0, even if you think you do, cause it's not wired into your lifeforce, or some such.

what yr grandparents called "the generation gap" in the 60s

and/or "if you remember the 60s you weren't really there"

social networking is pretty weird for over-40s in my exp -- you alternately feel creepy for hanging around young people so much and appalled by how odd any actual peers you encounter turn out to be.

Yes to all three. I got email when I started my sophomore year of college, so the fall of 1991.

social networking is pretty weird for over-40s in my exp -- you alternately feel creepy for hanging around young people so much and appalled by how odd any actual peers you encounter turn out to be.

That seems to be true for a few people I know as well. Mister M is currently astounded by how out and proud one of his college lecturers is on Facebook, when in college (admittedly 15 years ago now), he never even knew the guy was gay. Which is not odd, but it is unexpected.

Someone said recently that if you can remember a time before the internet, you'll never really get Web 2.0, even if you think you do, cause it's not wired into your lifeforce, or some such

I'm not sure I entirely believe this, but it and

you alternately feel creepy for hanging around young people so much and appalled by how odd any actual peers you encounter turn out to be

are also sort of what I was getting at, although they're both fairly banal.

certain bits of Web 2.0 I definitely get - I was really active on one sight for a year or two, but I found that as the people I'd come to "know" left, I somehow a) stopped meeting new ones and b) found most of the new joiners to be teenagers who just wanted to post pictures of HIM and MCR and FOB. and most importantly, it seemed like i'd hit a kind of glass ceiling in where the "relationships" could go (none of the people I'd "met" lived where I did), so the whole exercise seemed kind of pointless.

my answers were YNN, I guess I never said.

i remember a time, although when i was in 3rd grade we had something called "kidmail" that I think I thought was just a cool computer game that generated letters on a computer screen. i wasn't very smart.

anyway i think i first heard of it in 1994 or so. And YYY to your questions.

if you can remember a time before the internet, you'll never really get Web 2.0, even if you think you do, cause it's not wired into your lifeforce, or some such.

I think this is very true. At heart, I find it depressing - the endless spewing out of opinions, images etc. On the other hand I did find love through Web 2.0 (via flickr) so I am thankful for that.

I was quite enthusiastic about Myspace when it started up; I still like the idea of it - the messy, anarchic, self-publicising side to it (there's a romance to that because it's aspirational) - but I don't really use it much so I guess that says something. Facebook, on the other hand, I find really boring. It doesn't help that I know hardly anybody on it but I don't like the interface.

I read a post by Masonicboom on another thread (about Facebook) and she said she was trying to scale back her internet profile. I immediately identified with that. I think it's an age thing. There comes a point where you start to get sick of it all, I find.

YYY

I definitely didn't hear the term email till I was 12 or so. Which is when I got my first hotmail address which I'm still using now. In 1997, just before Hotmail got sold to Microsoft. whoa that's kind of weird to think about - that I've had the same email address for 10 years.

so YNY.

I'm so glad to see the word "Tandy" again

my mom had an old 286, it crashed whenever we tried to run Windows 3.0

My first direct experience with a computer was in 1970, when my high school installed a time-share terminal in one of the math classrooms. It did not have a CRT monitor, just a keyboard and a teletype that spewed tractor-feed printouts on greenbar paper. A friend of mine who took a programming course and was allowed to operate this precious machine demonstrated how to write some simple BASIC programs and let me use the keyboard for a while.

Much later, in 1985, I had the use of an Apple II that my wife, an elementary school librarian, brought home for the summer. I began to write a novel on it, which actually shaped up fairly well and I still have on disk as ASCII files. Never finished it, though. Life intervened.

The first computer I owned outright was a clone version of the IBM XT, with a 8 mhz CPU, amber monochrome monitor (reputed to be much better for your eyes than the green ones), and dot-matrix printer with a 9-pin matrix. It ran MS-DOS 3.3 in 640K of RAM. This was in 1988, or so. I learned to proram on this computer, starting with QuickBASIC and moving on to 8086 assembly language. I also started dialing in to FIDO bulletin boards in the late 1980s to swap programming info and blather.

I didn't get a genuine email account until I was hired as a technical writer in early 1994. The techheads in my company (meaning most of the employees; it was loaded with hardware and software engineers) were greatly excited by the recent introduction of Netscape 1.0 by CERN. It still looked kind of beta to me, but you could see it had possibilities.

Good times. Good times.

From wikipedia article on Arpanet: "In 1971, Ray Tomlinson of BBN sent the first network email [3]. By 1973, 75% of the ARPANET traffic was email."

I remember all that although party-lines are just a young memory from my grandmother's house.

I read this as panty-lines.

Y | N | Y

1st email was my 1st year of college - 1996 - with this free thing called hotmail.

I should've asked the question more carefully. Too many people seem to be answering "yes" to the first question more because they remember being, say, six and the concept of computers and e-mail being completely foreign mainly because of their age. As a couple of posters have pointed out, some version of electronic mail has existed since before probably about 90% of the posters here have lived.

"Raise your hand if you remember a time before mitya backtracked."

I remember a time when if you asked someone for their email address they would have probably had no idea what you were talking about. That's what I meant.

I'm about to start taking classes again and I'm really curious to see what role the net plays in academia now. Internet didn't really start taking off in the mainstream until my senior year of undergrad (with mosiac/netscape) so I have no clue what modern college classes will be like.

I dont think we really even had computers at my school apart from a few XTs or something that some hardcore math nerds programmed on. I didnt use computers til my public service job in the DOS days.

Oh wait hang on, I played some games on a C64 with the casette tape thingy in it in about 1987.

By the time we got a C64 we also got the floppy drive. The cassette was for the VIC20.

I loved that you hooked it up to the TV, and had to install a switch between the antenna/computer and the tube itself.

The cassette was for the VIC20.

Nah, I had a C64 with a cassette.

Yes sorry it was a vic20 not a C64. I wasnt a nerd back then.

i miss the pre-email age.

I am trying to remember the first time I heard of email. It was way early, before I'd actually been on the interweb myself, because my dad had it. But I am of the age that I can remember a time before email and I can remember a time in the very early 90s when the interweb was this amazing new thing. Well, not so much new, but finally *I* could get at it, not just my Dad.

I have a MySpace, though not a Facebook. I see the point of Web 2.0, I just don't see a need to use more than one of the networking sites. I went with MySpace coz I'm in a band.

I don';t think it's an age thing - I think it's an early adaptors thing. Even not even early, but just an adapting thing. Some people are comfortable with the idea of new technology. Sometimes that's down to exposure, sometimes it's just a kind of risk-taking, newness seeking thing.

I don't miss the pre-email days at ALL. My life would grind to a halt without email.

i only got started using email in 2003.

Are you from Kazakhstan?

You could use the cassette drive for both the 20 and the 64, I was just talking about my own experience.

TRS-80. Tape all the way, baby. I can remember my first computer with an actual floppy drive. They were so expensive to us kids that my brother made a homemade alarm to stop anyone (i.e. me) from stealing his.

Who's gonna rep for paper tape or punch cards? I remember my dad messing with those when I was a wee bairn.

heh ms misery.
i just didn't have access to a computer till my mid 20s.
didn't really give a fuck about em while i was a teenager.

I never owned a TRS-80 but those were the machines used in my first computer class (I was 7).

My parents still have a dusty IBM PC with dual 5 3/4" floppy drives in the corner of their den.

Who's gonna rep for paper tape or punch cards?

This dude:

http://dialog.ua.edu/dialog20020617/images/future2.jpg

The first time I was learning how to use DOS at work in a training class, this one old guy was asking ridiculous things like "whats the esc key, where is that!?"

Which would have been understandable if he wasnt the head of IT purchasing for the govt department I worked for o_O

Ohmigod, punch cards! My dad brought home box fulls in all kinds of pretty colours. My brother and I tried to think of games to play with them.

Printouts that he brough home were better - the back of them was great for drawing. Not so much the front, with all the green lines and the endless computer code.

Umm... I've worked with paper tape and punch cards. I've also worked with magnetic core stores/ferrite core memory. And I still have a disk at work THAT I USE on 8" floppy.

Am I the only one that remembers bernoulli drives?

this dude!

http://pages.sbcglobal.net/flv/ccsbbs/images/fidotmb.gif

http://www.ftngate.net/fidonet

http://www.region17.net/Pics/F-NOV84A.JPG

ynn.

i did have a friendster account, but i never understood what i was supposed to do with it.

i had friends in high school (mid-80s) who were into local bulletin boards, which i didn't really understand either. my mom had an email account for years before i did because she's a science teacher and had access to academic networks.

but my favorite fogey-luddite story was my managing editor at a daily paper about 11 years ago who wrote a column sneering that the internet was just the cb-radio of the '90s. (he now has a blog.)

I totally remember at my first job out of college (web designer) reading a report of a Bill Gate's speech. He declared that he saw the internet having no lasting business application. Oh the roffles.

YNY

i sent a university electronic mail sometime in the late 80s before going to college, and my CompSci mates mentioned it a few times. i even messaged someone on the Phoenix mainframe (i think) once when we were working on a minor programming project.

social networking - the internet has ALWAYS been about social networking. remember how e-mail started - it was a piggyback on FTP that was getting used more than FTP. everytime i've got into a new internet based system it's been about getting in touch with people - ICQ, early searching on altavista, bulletin boards. YOUNG PUPS come along with their 2.0 grumble moan

and yeah i remember the very early 70s, just, so that counts for the question proper

This thread tempted me to go to Google and search on my old email address through their deja-news archives. I got about 3400 hits. This wasted more than an hour of my time in pointless wallowing. I blame only myself.

YNN

Y N N
(except i do have a myspace login so I can stalk people properly and see their pix ;)

my buds and I got cb radios for home back in the late 70s (when we were about 12-13)so we could communicate, in retrospect that seems 1000x cooler than email/internet bullshit has ever been

lol, i just remembered my handle was "Scarecrow"

what age do people let their kids mess with the internet these days? i remember being frothing at the mouth excited when my parents finally let us install an aol trial disc when i was maybe nine but i also remember that IMing was commonplace by fifth grade just the next year so maybe i was a little younger. i know people with long-time long-distance close friends who met before they were ten on like prodigy message boards. of course i have facebook, myspace, i had friendster, livejournal, xanga, diaryland, etc

the earliest year i can remember wasting time chatting about music (and cats) on message boards is 1993. actually, scratch that... it was 1991!

Who's gonna rep for paper tape or punch cards?

The first computer I learned how to use and program was an APL time-share system. It used punch cards (this was in 1976). Later on in high school, I figured out how to use and program a derelict PDP-8L that was interfaced to a prototype Gemini spacecraft computer (the whole assembly was donated to the school). That used paper tapes.

HOWEVER, I win because I also learned how to program the high school's Burroughs analog computer via a patch panel not too dissimilar from an ARP2600. About all I could do was solve partial differential equations and graph out nice looking plots, but I was pretty buzzed about it.

YYN BTW

FWIW, I first got on the net and used email in 1985.

the earliest year i can remember chatting about music online with an ILXor is... 1994!

yes, of course i do.

no myspace, but i'm all over facebook and lovin' it (despite the initial reluctance i display towards every new innovation ever).

first e-mail i sent would have been 1994, between my first and second years at university. it was to a bloke called giles who i didn't really like, but he was the only other dude i knew with e-mail.

and from that second on, everything changed. it was like -- no, really -- i'd been waiting for this to happen all my life. it just seemed the most logical and wonderful way of communicating, and i embraced it with an almost embarrassing zeal.

i got my first computer -- a 48k spectrum -- in 1983, when i was eight or nine; i remember being fascinated by adverts for acoustic-coupler modems in your spectrum and sinclair user magazines, and desperately trying to persuade my poor, beleaguered father to sign up for prestel or micronet or whatever it was. (he wouldn't.) same story when we got an amstrad PC2286 in 1988/1989: all i ever wanted was a modem. all my dad wanted was for me to shut the fuck up and go and revise for my GCSEs.

it's just something about the joy of communication. we take it for granted. we shouldn't. it's fucking great.

i bet on fidonet they're still arguing about led zeppelin's best album

yes, no, yes

Y,N,N.

I got a ZX81 (1K, but with an extra 16K thing which I sometimes borrowed off a neighbour which you could plug in the back) when I was about 10 years old. Later my family had a BBC one with 32K. At first I learnt how to write very simple programs in BASIC, then I just played games on it, then I forgot about it.

Like several people on this thread I sent my first e-mail in my first term at university in 1991, but I didn't know it was called e-mail. In fact I didn't really understand what it was at all. I soon lost interest in that. I kept reading about the internet in newspapers circa 1993/94 and started noticing 'cybercafes' around about 1995, but I thought it was just for geeks.

I first started using the internet when I was travelling around Australia in 1997. I opened a hotmail account to keep in touch with people and vainly tried to find the football results before my time ran out. I didn't start using the internet regularly until at least 2000.

we had this when I was a kid:

http://www.99er.net/graphics/tiscrnbut.gif

y / y / y

Does BBS stuff count as email? If so, been on it since 1990, with first university email sent on summer 94.

I would be in basic & LOGO programming classes with my dad and a roomful of middle-aged guys when i was 9-10 or so.

I remember when if you wanted to d/l the new version of Navigator, at 14.4K, you needed to do it overnight and hope that when you woke u your connection hadn't dropped or timed out.

First email was '94 as a freshman at Univ. of Kansas. you were basically 247✧✧✧.32✧✧✧@a✧✧.c✧.uk✧✧✧.e✧✧. I think it was PINE before eudora?

First website visited (on my home connection): webcrawler.com.

y/n/n/

yeah, no, no.
I remember playing with LOGO and turtle as a kid.