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^C^1Electronic Mail - A History and Overview
^Cby
^CDaniel Tobias

   Electronic mail (E-Mail) is a system whereby messages can be sent from one 
computer user to another without being printed out on paper at any step along 
the way.  It is rapidly increasing in popularity, and will some day be as 
commonplace as the telephone and the postal system.  This article describes 
where E-Mail came from, where it is going, and how you can use it. 

   E-Mail can be said to have been born with the advent of Telex in the 1930's.
This was an extremely crude system.  The sender typed a message on a teletype 
terminal; the message was transmitted over telegraph lines to the recipient's 
teletype.  The transmission speed made today's 300-baud modems appear to be 
lightning-fast in comparison.  Nevertheless, it was the first system by which 
the text of a message could be transmitted in a relatively automatic fashion 
rather than requiring a trained telegraph operator to transcribe dots and 
dashes.

   The Telex system was set up without any use of computers, since they were 
not yet invented.  Computers began to show up in the 1940's and 1950's, but 
were still expensive hulks used primarily for number-crunching; they ran in 
"batch mode" with users submitting programs and data on punch cards and 
getting a result printout some time later.  Under these circumstances, 
communication was still not a feasible use for these beasts. 

   However, in the 1960's, the concept of "time-sharing" appeared. At universi-
ties, many users (initially in research departments, but eventually including 
students as well) wished to use the limited resources of the computer, and 
didn't like waiting.  The solution was to allow several users online at once, 
and share the processing time between them.  Each user's program would run more 
slowly than it would if the user had full control of the machine, but more 
people would be able to work at once. 

   Now that several people were "talking" to the computer at once, it was 
inevitable that somebody would think of allowing users to "chat" with others.  
This could be useful, particularly for the system operator, who liked to be 
able to inform the users that "The system is going down in one minute!" But 
other users, too, wished to send messages through the computer; that might be 
the only way to reach "hackers" staying at their terminals to the exclusion of 
such things as eating and sleeping.  Thus, message features were added to most 
timesharing systems. 

   But it's not enough to be able to send messages to people currently logged 
on.  You have the same problem as "telephone tag"; what if you never manage to 
catch the person you want to send a message to?  You might never happen to be 
online at the same time.  Thus, a "mail" feature was invented.   It works like 
this:  Enter a message addressed to another user, and it goes into a "mailbox" 
file reserved for the addressee, to be viewed whenever the recipient gets 
around to it. 

   Thus was true E-Mail invented, and its basic features have not changed 
since.  It caught on rapidly wherever it was introduced.  E-Mail combines the 
best features of mail and phone:  Like the phone, it is immediate; an E-Mail 
message will usually be "delivered" within a few seconds.  However, like a 
letter, an E-Mail message can be sent even if the recipient is not present; it 
will wait around patiently for the addressee to show up and read it.  On 
campuses with internal E-Mail systems, students can often hand in homework, ask 
questions of their professors, and carry on philosophical discussions by way of 
the computer. 

   Soon other mainframe computer users in business, government, and research 
sites emulated the colleges by setting up their own mail systems; there, they 
proved just as valuable a means of communications.

   Once E-Mail was established on timesharing systems, the next step was to 
join several computers together into a network.  After all, many large 
institutions had more than one computer, and users of the different computers 
wanted to be able to talk to one another.  This was accomplished by wiring 
together computers in close physical proximity, and establishing links through 
telephone lines to connect computers that were far away.  Now, you could enter 
messages not only to local users, but to users in other machines on the 
network.

   Most early networks were within institutions, but it was not long before 
larger networks sprung up which linked diverse establishments.  A pioneer in 
this area was the ARPAnet, set up by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced 
Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the major funder of computer science research 
in this country.  This network links research sites at various universities and 
other places. 

   Soon other nets were founded.  The UUCP network (also known as "UseNet" or 
the Unix network) links users of the Unix operating system; BITnet and CSnet 
link various universities; and there is a whole profusion of others.  There are 
many "gateways" between different networks, allowing mail to be sent from one 
to another, although you often have to be a computer wizard to figure out the 
cryptic addresses, like: 

^C^1"ihnp4!crash!bang!jsmith"%ucbvax.berkeley.edu@csnet-relay.arpa^0.

(This is what they really look like... no joke.)

   While the large institutions were busy creating E-Mail networks, computer 
hobbyists weren't left out; they accomplished the same thing as individuals.  
The invention of the personal computer gave them a chance to get in on the 
action.  Beginning in the 1970's, hobbyists set up "Bulletin Board Systems" 
(BBS's) consisting of a personal computer wired to a modem, so that other 
personal computer users can call the system to leave messages for one another.  
One of the BBS pioneers was Ward Christensen, who ran one of the first such 
systems in 1978, and later invented the "XMODEM" protocol to allow files of 
arbitrary type (programs and graphics as well as text) to be sent reliably 
through a BBS.  (XMODEM is still -- and properly -- known among old computists 
as the "Christensen Protocol".)

   In 1984, Tom Jennings wrote the "Fido" BBS program for the IBM PC.  This 
differed from its predecessors in that Fido systems could be joined into a 
network, very similarly to the networks created by the "big guys".  A user of 
a Fido system can enter a message tagged to be sent to a remote node; then, 
in the middle of the night, Fido boards call one another to exchange messages 
at the low nighttime phone rates.  FidoNet began with just a couple of friends 
participating; today it has over 1000 nodes.  To find out more about FidoNet, 
call our own BBS, Soft Fido, at (318) 636-4402.  We have a full worldwide list 
of Fido systems available for download. 

   All these E-Mail systems are used by relatively limited groups of people.  
The university and company networks are useful if you work or study at an 
institution that participates in one, but are not accessible to the general 
public.  Local bulletin board systems are publicly-accessible, but if you want 
to start a conversation on a BBS with somebody out of town, one or both of you 
must rack up expensive long-distance charges.  You can participate in FidoNet 
by finding and calling a Fido system in your area.  However, messages take at 
least a day to be delivered, and are subject to the vagaries of a network that 
is, after all, mostly run by amateurs in their spare time; it is not up to the 
level of reliability of, say, the telephone system.  Thus, one more category of 
E-Mail, the commercial systems, had to be created to bring fast, reliable E-
Mail into the hands of the public. 

   There are a variety of commercial E-Mail systems.  Some, like CompuServe and 
The Source, are full-featured systems with many services.  Others, like MCI 
Mail, are purely electronic mail.  What they have in common is that you access 
them by calling a local number in your area with a modem, and typing your 
password, which you have obtained by signing up with them in advance.  You can 
enter messages for other users, and are charged either for the length of time 
spent online, the size of the message, or some combination of these and other 
factors, depending on the service.  If another user has sent you a message, you 
are alerted of this when you log in. 

   Originally, users of one commercial service could only send mail to other 
users of the same service; however, now, there are some gateways between the 
commercial services just as with the university nets.  For instance, CompuServe
and MCI Mail users can send mail to each other.  Several commercial E-Mail 
systems offer gateways into the Telex system (remember it?), allowing those who 
have switched to a more modern computerized system to communicate with holdovers
still using teletypes.  Perhaps the most promising trend is from a new service 
called Mnematics; it allows users to send mail to a number of other services, 
including MCI Mail, AT&T Mail, CompuServe, The Source, Telex, and UUCP.  See 
the enclosed coupon and the "Special Offers" text for a deal to let you get 
online with Mnematics.

   One additional feature provided by some services (MCI Mail, for instance) 
is the ability to send messages to non-computer-users by having them printed 
out and sent through the U.S. Mail.  The U.S. Postal Service themselves 
attempted a service of this sort, called E-COM, designed mostly for those who 
wished to send form letters to lots of people.  E-COM was a failure in the 
marketplace, and has been discontinued.  It wasn't really an "E-Mail" service 
anyway, since it had no option to send messages to other users directly on the 
computer with no paper printout. 

   E-Mail has a bright future, and can be used for many purposes at home, 
school, and office.  In my opinion, it will catch on faster once it is linked 
into a unified system, like the phone system.  When you make a phone call, you 
don't have to worry about what local and long-distance phone companies the 
person you are calling uses; they are all part of one network with a consistent 
system of country codes, area codes, exchanges, and local numbers, covering 
most of the world.  Similarly, E-Mail can and should be fully inter-networked, 
so that all users (whether they are on a commercial system, a university 
computer, or a hobbyist BBS network) can send mail to all others.  The first 
steps toward networking have already been taken, and it is fully technically 
feasible.  The barriers are economic, as many systems don't want competitors to 
interconnect with them, and arrangements have not yet been devised to allow 
commercial systems and non-profit networks to interconnect. 

   But I feel these problems can and must be ultimately solved.  Once they 
are, E-Mail will take off and become the dominant form of communications. 

   One final thing:  if E-Mail is to be as useful as the telephone, there 
should be an "E-Mail Directory" allowing you to find the electronic address of 
a person just as easily as you can find a phone number.  There is a group 
attempting to do just that; call (800) 622-0505 with your modem to add your own 
E-Mail address to their list.  It is free, and will get you on their mailing 
list to receive special offers, including a limited number of free accesses to 
their system to see others' listings.
