An Ode to Email
In honor of “First Email Day”, I’m celebrating the 50 years since Ray Tomlinson sent the first email with the immortal words “QWERTYUIOP” (or something similar… since he long forgot what he’d first sent as the equivalent of his “Watson, come here please” message).
I’m sure we all have our “when I first got email” story… mine starts back in 1985 soon after I got my hands on a modem. It was a blindingly fast 300 baud box I’d borrowed from a friend and connected to my beloved Apple IIe (I’m pretty sure I returned it… right?). Anyway, after spending a couple weeks dialing into local BBSs, I started wondering what else I could do with it.
Enter (person who shall remain nameless) who shared a dial-in number for their college’s library VAX. After noodling around as a “guest” in the system for more hours than really makes any sense today, I asked if there was anything else I could do while connected. They then gave me access to someone’s (likely purloined) account, and I began my indoctrination into the mysteries of UNIX.
A couple days (weeks?) later, and every day after school (did I mention I was only 13?) I was logging in and learning more commands each time. Frustratingly, though, I was always waiting until a “users” command told me my friend was online so I could ask more questions. But then they said, “Dude, just send me email.”
What was this magic?! They explained how to send a bang!path addressed message to their specific @ account. That way, I could write my questions and drop them into their directory so they’d see ’em when logging in and can toss back a reply to the account I was using. Wow. It was like a single user BBS!
And that’s how it started… Email has been part of my life ever since. In those early days, I totally abused it by asking endless questions about how to manipulate my environment variables and use Emacs (’cause VI is for chumps). But most importantly… we used email to coordinate when we’d log in at the same time to play our favorite MUD.
Little did I know that 36 years later I’d be working for Proofpoint and collaborating with the likes of Messaging, Malware, Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group on email security technologies standardized by the IETF. But here we are, as a recent inductee into the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) hall of fame for my efforts!
And it’s all thanks to Ray playing around in his spare time coming up with an easier way to communicate. Huzzah! … But if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to relive my youth by logging into a game of Darker Realms. :)
