10 ms·

Ray Tomlinson, Inventor of Email, Has Died

451 points by jrbedard 11y ago

sethammons 11y ago
I work in the email space; thanks to this guy's invention, I can feed my family and have a solid financial life. It is amazing, the web of events, that shape our lives and the lives of others. RIP.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Even lots of people that are not directly active in the email space owe a part of their income to them, I find it a lot easier to imagine a world without smartphones or the web than I find it to imagine a world without email.
  - jamesrcole 11y ago
    I think it's fair to say that email has had a big impact on the modern world. I wonder how much the economy would break down, and have to change, if email suddenly went away? And even if someone doesn't use it that much for personal communication, it's part of the underlying net infrastructure (think account-creation verification emails, password reset emails, bank statements, etc).
    - brianclements 11y ago
      "I wonder how much the economy would break down, and have to change, if email suddenly went away?" Or suddenly went proprietary.
      - jacquesm 11y ago
        > Or suddenly went proprietary. It might even happen.
        w1ntermute 11y ago
        It almost did happen. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
        chei0aiV 11y ago
        It pretty much did happen: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be... https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/sep/15/email/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/sep/15/email/
- hackuser 11y ago
  > I work in the email space; thanks to this guy's invention, I can feed my family and have a solid financial life. It is amazing, the web of events, that shape our lives and the lives of others. Consider what would have happened if email was a patented, proprietary tech (like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) rather than open.
  - cm2187 11y ago
    The patent would have expired in the early 90s, before the internet even went mainstream...
dboreham 11y ago
Not to take anything away from his legacy, but isn't it a stretch to talk about the "invention" of email when we had telex, telegrams, heliography, scrolls of vellum carried by Roman messenger, and so on? What's left to invent?
- jMyles 11y ago
  I'm not sure why you are being downvoted because this is a very legitimate question. Fortunately it's not hard to see that email, and Tomlinson's contributions, were incredibly novel and have shaped a lot of "good parts" of the internet today. Although obviously email was conceptually based on a very old notion of communication, embodied, as you point out, by many media that came before it, it had to solve a few small, specific problems inherent in moving messages from one system to another via a simple network protocol. The use of the "user@domain" notion of identity seems mundane today, but in some important ways it was a huge breakthrough in the way that people thought about humans and the systems that need to work in order for them to be contacted.
  - dalke 11y ago
    Could you elaborate on the the different notions of identity in, say, "chernenko@mcvax.su" vs. "mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko"? Is it because the "@" form is more stand-alone while the "!" embeds with it a sense of what you think others might think is notable?
- BellsOnSunday 11y ago
  It's not a stretch at all, it's true that he invented that particular technology. Nobody said he invented the idea of passing a message from one place/person to another.
- SonicSoul 11y ago
  an invention does not need to be a completely new concept. A car was invented even after people were able to get from point A to point B via many means. Yet the car is still a big leap forward. Email seems obvious to you now, but at one point there were many obstacles to overcome to make it work.
bane 11y ago
It's funny how core of a service the idea of email is...even pre-internet. Once companies started supplying dumb terminals connected to the corporate mainframe on every executive's desk, "electronic mail" quickly supplanted paper memos. In my college OS class we had to build a *nix-like OS from the ground up and one of the required basic services we had to build was user-to-user messaging. After hacking out basic versions of "ls" and "cat" that was pretty much what we built next. What was not so obvious, and much harder to do, and required something like the internet to solve was system-to-system mail transfer, which Tomlinson created. It turns out to be a strangely hard problem to do well. It's not hard to get it up and running, but the edge-cases and abuses have plagued us ever since. Maybe the problem is humans.
shmerl 11y ago
We are mighty lucky that e-mail managed to become interoperable and we can easily send e-mails to users of any server without breaking our heads and wondering whether their servers and clients will understand that. Instant messaging on the other hand failed miserably in this regard.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  I keep wondering if it is became of the era it was made in. email was store and forward by necessity. IM was anything but.
- userbinator 11y ago
  There is IRC, which still has a reasonable number of users but isn't "global" in the way email is, SIP which could be used for IM but often wasn't, and Microsoft even attempted(but failed) to standardise MSN Messenger's protocol: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-protocol-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-protoc...
  - shmerl 11y ago
    XMPP came closest to offering something serious enough. But most turned their backs on it and didn't propose anything better either.
    - voltagex_ 11y ago
      It's not that people intentionally turned their backs on it (Facebook and Google did, for combined business and technical reasons). It's that people will use whatever's easiest to use at the time, with a heavy bias to going where their friends are, whether that's iMessage (with the associated hardware cost), Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or even IRC.
- patrickaljord 11y ago
  > interoperable and we can easily send e-mails to users of any server without breaking our heads and wondering whether their servers and clients will understand that Not sure this holds true anymore in practice. Try to set up your own email server, your emails will probably get sent to spam by gmail, yahoo etc. Sure, it is technically possible, but it is time consuming and still risky to use it for business. At least you can still use your own domain and switch providers (google apps, outlook etc).
iMark 11y ago
Surely a black banner day, if ever there was one?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- publicfig 11y ago
  I've noticed that they've pretty much quit doing that, and as much as I agree with you, I think that's for the best. You never want it to turn into a competition as to whether or not someone's death was meaningful enough to merit it, and at the same time avoid just having a constant black bar in the title.
techdragon 11y ago
I think I'll try to honour this day by sending as little email as possible. As close to an "email moment of silence" as I can achieve I suppose.
AdamN 11y ago
Internet pioneers used to invent tools of communication like email, TCP/IP, DNS - now the pioneers are building walled gardens like Facebook, Twitter, Google :-/
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Facebook, Twitter and Google are the railroad tycoons (Twitter might only be aspiring), they came after the pioneers and built valuable infrastructure, capturing much of the value for themselves. If you are going to torture an analogy, I say make it scream.
theologic 11y ago
Actually email is worth thinking about because if you didn't live it, you might not understand it's path or impact. I came to age in technology at a strange age, being at a start-up in 1979 in high school, then getting my EE degree at the University of Washington in the late 80s, before joining IBM. For those of you not around and the time, by the time I got to the UW, we had email and could send messages worldwide with BITNET. However, it was not critical and not used as much as you might think. Actually, USENET was a much bigger part of any geeks life. USENET had an amazing impact on everything we did in academia, and I remember getting on MINIX USENET group and some geek from Europe saying that he was trying to do his own operating system. I was more hardware oriented, and I missed my chance to contribute to early Linux. Where I first saw email becoming central to a culture is when I got to IBM. PROFS notes, or email, had a massive impact on the entire culture. The combination of calendar and email and the internal culture that had a terminal in every conference room would be familiar with most readers of Hacker news. You could have survived with what they offered in today's modern world. The person responsible for the addition of email to PROFS was not influenced by what was happening in BITNET. The email in university was like a home brewed computer. I am not saying it wasn't important, but I'm saying that the adoption of email wasn't tied to this. However, the fact that IBM pushed email was as central as IBM creating a personal computer, only in this case it wasn't following Apple. I saw an article on the founder of IBM PROFS email, and so I hunted him down on email while I was at IBM. I regret I cannot remember his name, but I wanted to say he was in research at Almaden, but this may be an human ECC error. However, I do remember that I wanted to know how obvious the creation of email was for everybody, and how much it was embraced. He stated at the time that most people thought that it would not be central to business life. Nobody saw the impact of email coming. In the list of cognitive biases, we call it simply "Hindsight Bias." It just goes to show how the obvious is not obvious until it happens. My question, "What is happen today, that will be the next email that we are all missing?"
- ilvnvtoomuch 11y ago
  "..I remember getting on MINIX USENET group and some geek from Europe saying that he was trying to do his own operating system..." I can relate to a certain extent. I had the opportunity to interact with an early Google employee (Ex-professor) and I did't pursue or dive into that domain. I could have been more successful in a technical field. Now I do Program Management :)
bpicolo 11y ago
Have lost a lot of great names in Computer Science lately. While sad, it's a great testament to how fast computers have evolved. Everything here that we have has evolved within a single generation. Incredible. The pace of human technological growth in the last 100 years has been explosive. It seems from my perspective now, it's slowed, but I'm now thinking that assumption is very wrong. I think in retrospect it's going to continue to explode, and it's only my view of what I'm using currently that makes it seem that way. Even a few slow years can be easily ignored in context of the leaps and bounds technology tends to evolve in: The transistor, the internet, the world as mobile... The future is, and will always be, awesome potential.
cantrevealname 11y ago
> Thee very first email has been lost to time. As he said in an NPR interview from 2009, they were just random strings of text. As usual, technical people easily miss the marketing value of sound bites. He should have invented a clever and catchy story about the first email. Technical people will immediately say that you can't do that because that would a lie, forgetting the thousand "lies" that we are all complicit in (Santa Claus, tooth fairy, "your tie/haircut looks nice", "sorry, I don't have any change to give you"). EBay founder Omidyar said that eBay was invented to trade Pez dispensers, a story he's now admitted is completely false, but no one seems to be too worked up over that. Apparently Omidyar understands the difference between a lie (has an actual negative effect on someone) and marketing fluff (makes for an interesting story but is just trivia). For such an influential person--in the sense that he had a huge impact on the world--Tomlinson is completely unknown. I'm guessing that his financial reward for inventing email was essentially nothing as well.
- timthorn 11y ago
  > Technical people will immediately say that you can't do that because that would a lie. Technical people, and people with integrity.
  - cantrevealname 11y ago
    So you're calling Pierre Omidyar a _______? Did you tell your kids about Santa Claus? Did your parents tell you about Santa Claus? Does it follow that you or your parents lack integrity? The world is not truth vs lies. There's more nuance. This illustrates why many brilliant technical people lacking marketing sense are relegated to obscurity.
    - setpatchaddress 11y ago
      fluffer
    - umanwizard 11y ago
      > Did you tell your kids about Santa Claus? I don't have kids, and if I ever do, I'll tell them Santa is a fun legend people like to play along with, but that it isn't real. > Did your parents tell you about Santa Claus? Yes, but by the time my sister was born, they had changed their tune to what I describe above, and she didn't seem to suffer any development ill effects, still enjoyed Christmas, etc.
contingencies 11y ago
Nobody here has considered the environmental impact of this invention. How much physical mail have we stopped lugging around the globe because of email? Then social impact: by popularizing near-instantaneous global written interpersonal communication we have removed the walled garden of national language, culture and politics. Suddenly, a great force of inertia demands that every profession, every social and political issue must be viewed within its truly global context. Of course, we're not quite there yet but it's a clear trajectory. Connecting the hive mind was really a red pill moment for humanity.
- webkike 11y ago
  Apparently the amount is about 30 billion pieces of mail, whatever that means[1] [1] http://www.heritage.org/~/media/Images/Reports/2013/10/bg2848/BG-USPS-future-chart-2.ashx http://www.heritage.org/~/media/Images/Reports/2013/10/bg284...
  - contingencies 11y ago
    That figure appears to be annually, and United States USPS 'first class' mail only: https://web.archive.org/web/20120114113728/http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/first-class-mail-1926-2010.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20120114113728/http://about.usps...
    - yitchelle 11y ago
      Wow! Not even sure if that can be extrapolated into other markets such as China or India (although the take impact is not as big due to their lack of internet access). The impact is very big indeed. May have to start calling "post office" the "cargo office" as cargo would be the only item physically sent.
      - contingencies 11y ago
        Actually I live in mainland China. They really jumped on the internet. Letters basically no longer exist here, it's even rare for bills to be sent by mail, it's all electronic: they skipped that stage. Just as you say: cargo office, except that unlike the US with Fedex and DHL, here they have about 20 private national courier companies, and their prices are really low.
webwanderings 11y ago
Email is the only revolutionary communication technology there is. The next evolution is that of email lists. Anything else beyond these two, be that Twitter, Facebook, etc (they are nothing more than public email) are not evolutionary in true sense. I'd only take away BCC feature from the email as a mistake, or useless. Email-lists should have been the true BCC.
- bcook 11y ago
  Only? IRC is pretty rockin'.
  - webwanderings 11y ago
    IRC/Live-chatting does not really solve any new problem which the Email has not solved already. If you look at live-chatting in the corporate and the personal world, you'll see that most often (and when things gets tough) people tend to either pick up a phone, or they'd send long-form email.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      A lot of people would disagree with you. Sure, once something requires higher bandwidth or longer-form 1:1 or 1:few communication, it makes sense to switch modes but there's a lot of value in short-form synchronous communications. I don't actually use IRC/IM comms a lot myself (other than as a sidebar for video meetings) but I have in the past and would do more in different citcumstances.
aws_ls 11y ago
Email is such a profound application on Internet. Kind of like air or water, and therefore its (nearly) free[1]. The walled garden social networks are like Coke (or sugary water) or polluted air in comparison. Aren't there any poets here, who could pen a few couplets in his memory & respect? Just saying RIP to such a great Engineer, feels so not enough. Feel proud to call myself an Engineer, when such giants also call them one. [1] - we have freedom via choice. If you use gmail/yahoo/etc you know you are doing a trade off. But its comforting to have choice.
mattdeboard 11y ago
What's the criteria for the black band at the top of the page when a tech luminary passes away?
ericfrederich 11y ago
Too bad he never got to see it replaced with something like Google Wave
elcct 11y ago
100% of people who invented email, died.

451 points by jrbedard 11y ago

I work in the email space; thanks to this guy's invention, I can feed my family and have a solid financial life. It is amazing, the web of events, that shape our lives and the lives of others. RIP.

jacquesm 11y ago
Even lots of people that are not directly active in the email space owe a part of their income to them, I find it a lot easier to imagine a world without smartphones or the web than I find it to imagine a world without email.
- jamesrcole 11y ago
  I think it's fair to say that email has had a big impact on the modern world. I wonder how much the economy would break down, and have to change, if email suddenly went away? And even if someone doesn't use it that much for personal communication, it's part of the underlying net infrastructure (think account-creation verification emails, password reset emails, bank statements, etc).
  - brianclements 11y ago
    "I wonder how much the economy would break down, and have to change, if email suddenly went away?" Or suddenly went proprietary.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      > Or suddenly went proprietary. It might even happen.
      - w1ntermute 11y ago
        It almost did happen. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
        chei0aiV 11y ago
        It pretty much did happen: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be... https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/sep/15/email/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/sep/15/email/
hackuser 11y ago
> I work in the email space; thanks to this guy's invention, I can feed my family and have a solid financial life. It is amazing, the web of events, that shape our lives and the lives of others. Consider what would have happened if email was a patented, proprietary tech (like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) rather than open.
- cm2187 11y ago
  The patent would have expired in the early 90s, before the internet even went mainstream...

dboreham 11y ago

Not to take anything away from his legacy, but isn't it a stretch to talk about the "invention" of email when we had telex, telegrams, heliography, scrolls of vellum carried by Roman messenger, and so on? What's left to invent?

jMyles 11y ago
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted because this is a very legitimate question. Fortunately it's not hard to see that email, and Tomlinson's contributions, were incredibly novel and have shaped a lot of "good parts" of the internet today. Although obviously email was conceptually based on a very old notion of communication, embodied, as you point out, by many media that came before it, it had to solve a few small, specific problems inherent in moving messages from one system to another via a simple network protocol. The use of the "user@domain" notion of identity seems mundane today, but in some important ways it was a huge breakthrough in the way that people thought about humans and the systems that need to work in order for them to be contacted.
- dalke 11y ago
  Could you elaborate on the the different notions of identity in, say, "chernenko@mcvax.su" vs. "mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko"? Is it because the "@" form is more stand-alone while the "!" embeds with it a sense of what you think others might think is notable?
BellsOnSunday 11y ago
It's not a stretch at all, it's true that he invented that particular technology. Nobody said he invented the idea of passing a message from one place/person to another.
SonicSoul 11y ago
an invention does not need to be a completely new concept. A car was invented even after people were able to get from point A to point B via many means. Yet the car is still a big leap forward. Email seems obvious to you now, but at one point there were many obstacles to overcome to make it work.

bane 11y ago

It's funny how core of a service the idea of email is...even pre-internet. Once companies started supplying dumb terminals connected to the corporate mainframe on every executive's desk, "electronic mail" quickly supplanted paper memos. In my college OS class we had to build a *nix-like OS from the ground up and one of the required basic services we had to build was user-to-user messaging. After hacking out basic versions of "ls" and "cat" that was pretty much what we built next. What was not so obvious, and much harder to do, and required something like the internet to solve was system-to-system mail transfer, which Tomlinson created. It turns out to be a strangely hard problem to do well. It's not hard to get it up and running, but the edge-cases and abuses have plagued us ever since. Maybe the problem is humans.

shmerl 11y ago

We are mighty lucky that e-mail managed to become interoperable and we can easily send e-mails to users of any server without breaking our heads and wondering whether their servers and clients will understand that. Instant messaging on the other hand failed miserably in this regard.

digi_owl 11y ago
I keep wondering if it is became of the era it was made in. email was store and forward by necessity. IM was anything but.
userbinator 11y ago
There is IRC, which still has a reasonable number of users but isn't "global" in the way email is, SIP which could be used for IM but often wasn't, and Microsoft even attempted(but failed) to standardise MSN Messenger's protocol: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-protocol-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-protoc...
- shmerl 11y ago
  XMPP came closest to offering something serious enough. But most turned their backs on it and didn't propose anything better either.
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    It's not that people intentionally turned their backs on it (Facebook and Google did, for combined business and technical reasons). It's that people will use whatever's easiest to use at the time, with a heavy bias to going where their friends are, whether that's iMessage (with the associated hardware cost), Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or even IRC.
patrickaljord 11y ago
> interoperable and we can easily send e-mails to users of any server without breaking our heads and wondering whether their servers and clients will understand that Not sure this holds true anymore in practice. Try to set up your own email server, your emails will probably get sent to spam by gmail, yahoo etc. Sure, it is technically possible, but it is time consuming and still risky to use it for business. At least you can still use your own domain and switch providers (google apps, outlook etc).

iMark 11y ago

Surely a black banner day, if ever there was one?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
publicfig 11y ago
I've noticed that they've pretty much quit doing that, and as much as I agree with you, I think that's for the best. You never want it to turn into a competition as to whether or not someone's death was meaningful enough to merit it, and at the same time avoid just having a constant black bar in the title.

techdragon 11y ago

I think I'll try to honour this day by sending as little email as possible. As close to an "email moment of silence" as I can achieve I suppose.

AdamN 11y ago

Internet pioneers used to invent tools of communication like email, TCP/IP, DNS - now the pioneers are building walled gardens like Facebook, Twitter, Google :-/

maxerickson 11y ago
Facebook, Twitter and Google are the railroad tycoons (Twitter might only be aspiring), they came after the pioneers and built valuable infrastructure, capturing much of the value for themselves. If you are going to torture an analogy, I say make it scream.

theologic 11y ago

Actually email is worth thinking about because if you didn't live it, you might not understand it's path or impact. I came to age in technology at a strange age, being at a start-up in 1979 in high school, then getting my EE degree at the University of Washington in the late 80s, before joining IBM. For those of you not around and the time, by the time I got to the UW, we had email and could send messages worldwide with BITNET. However, it was not critical and not used as much as you might think. Actually, USENET was a much bigger part of any geeks life. USENET had an amazing impact on everything we did in academia, and I remember getting on MINIX USENET group and some geek from Europe saying that he was trying to do his own operating system. I was more hardware oriented, and I missed my chance to contribute to early Linux. Where I first saw email becoming central to a culture is when I got to IBM. PROFS notes, or email, had a massive impact on the entire culture. The combination of calendar and email and the internal culture that had a terminal in every conference room would be familiar with most readers of Hacker news. You could have survived with what they offered in today's modern world. The person responsible for the addition of email to PROFS was not influenced by what was happening in BITNET. The email in university was like a home brewed computer. I am not saying it wasn't important, but I'm saying that the adoption of email wasn't tied to this. However, the fact that IBM pushed email was as central as IBM creating a personal computer, only in this case it wasn't following Apple. I saw an article on the founder of IBM PROFS email, and so I hunted him down on email while I was at IBM. I regret I cannot remember his name, but I wanted to say he was in research at Almaden, but this may be an human ECC error. However, I do remember that I wanted to know how obvious the creation of email was for everybody, and how much it was embraced. He stated at the time that most people thought that it would not be central to business life. Nobody saw the impact of email coming. In the list of cognitive biases, we call it simply "Hindsight Bias." It just goes to show how the obvious is not obvious until it happens. My question, "What is happen today, that will be the next email that we are all missing?"

ilvnvtoomuch 11y ago
"..I remember getting on MINIX USENET group and some geek from Europe saying that he was trying to do his own operating system..." I can relate to a certain extent. I had the opportunity to interact with an early Google employee (Ex-professor) and I did't pursue or dive into that domain. I could have been more successful in a technical field. Now I do Program Management :)

bpicolo 11y ago

Have lost a lot of great names in Computer Science lately. While sad, it's a great testament to how fast computers have evolved. Everything here that we have has evolved within a single generation. Incredible. The pace of human technological growth in the last 100 years has been explosive. It seems from my perspective now, it's slowed, but I'm now thinking that assumption is very wrong. I think in retrospect it's going to continue to explode, and it's only my view of what I'm using currently that makes it seem that way. Even a few slow years can be easily ignored in context of the leaps and bounds technology tends to evolve in: The transistor, the internet, the world as mobile... The future is, and will always be, awesome potential.

cantrevealname 11y ago

> Thee very first email has been lost to time. As he said in an NPR interview from 2009, they were just random strings of text. As usual, technical people easily miss the marketing value of sound bites. He should have invented a clever and catchy story about the first email. Technical people will immediately say that you can't do that because that would a lie, forgetting the thousand "lies" that we are all complicit in (Santa Claus, tooth fairy, "your tie/haircut looks nice", "sorry, I don't have any change to give you"). EBay founder Omidyar said that eBay was invented to trade Pez dispensers, a story he's now admitted is completely false, but no one seems to be too worked up over that. Apparently Omidyar understands the difference between a lie (has an actual negative effect on someone) and marketing fluff (makes for an interesting story but is just trivia). For such an influential person--in the sense that he had a huge impact on the world--Tomlinson is completely unknown. I'm guessing that his financial reward for inventing email was essentially nothing as well.

timthorn 11y ago
> Technical people will immediately say that you can't do that because that would a lie. Technical people, and people with integrity.
- cantrevealname 11y ago
  So you're calling Pierre Omidyar a _______? Did you tell your kids about Santa Claus? Did your parents tell you about Santa Claus? Does it follow that you or your parents lack integrity? The world is not truth vs lies. There's more nuance. This illustrates why many brilliant technical people lacking marketing sense are relegated to obscurity.
  - setpatchaddress 11y ago
    fluffer
  - umanwizard 11y ago
    > Did you tell your kids about Santa Claus? I don't have kids, and if I ever do, I'll tell them Santa is a fun legend people like to play along with, but that it isn't real. > Did your parents tell you about Santa Claus? Yes, but by the time my sister was born, they had changed their tune to what I describe above, and she didn't seem to suffer any development ill effects, still enjoyed Christmas, etc.

contingencies 11y ago

Nobody here has considered the environmental impact of this invention. How much physical mail have we stopped lugging around the globe because of email? Then social impact: by popularizing near-instantaneous global written interpersonal communication we have removed the walled garden of national language, culture and politics. Suddenly, a great force of inertia demands that every profession, every social and political issue must be viewed within its truly global context. Of course, we're not quite there yet but it's a clear trajectory. Connecting the hive mind was really a red pill moment for humanity.

webkike 11y ago
Apparently the amount is about 30 billion pieces of mail, whatever that means[1] [1] http://www.heritage.org/~/media/Images/Reports/2013/10/bg2848/BG-USPS-future-chart-2.ashx http://www.heritage.org/~/media/Images/Reports/2013/10/bg284...
- contingencies 11y ago
  That figure appears to be annually, and United States USPS 'first class' mail only: https://web.archive.org/web/20120114113728/http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/first-class-mail-1926-2010.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20120114113728/http://about.usps...
  - yitchelle 11y ago
    Wow! Not even sure if that can be extrapolated into other markets such as China or India (although the take impact is not as big due to their lack of internet access). The impact is very big indeed. May have to start calling "post office" the "cargo office" as cargo would be the only item physically sent.
    - contingencies 11y ago
      Actually I live in mainland China. They really jumped on the internet. Letters basically no longer exist here, it's even rare for bills to be sent by mail, it's all electronic: they skipped that stage. Just as you say: cargo office, except that unlike the US with Fedex and DHL, here they have about 20 private national courier companies, and their prices are really low.

webwanderings 11y ago

Email is the only revolutionary communication technology there is. The next evolution is that of email lists. Anything else beyond these two, be that Twitter, Facebook, etc (they are nothing more than public email) are not evolutionary in true sense. I'd only take away BCC feature from the email as a mistake, or useless. Email-lists should have been the true BCC.

bcook 11y ago
Only? IRC is pretty rockin'.
- webwanderings 11y ago
  IRC/Live-chatting does not really solve any new problem which the Email has not solved already. If you look at live-chatting in the corporate and the personal world, you'll see that most often (and when things gets tough) people tend to either pick up a phone, or they'd send long-form email.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    A lot of people would disagree with you. Sure, once something requires higher bandwidth or longer-form 1:1 or 1:few communication, it makes sense to switch modes but there's a lot of value in short-form synchronous communications. I don't actually use IRC/IM comms a lot myself (other than as a sidebar for video meetings) but I have in the past and would do more in different citcumstances.

aws_ls 11y ago

Email is such a profound application on Internet. Kind of like air or water, and therefore its (nearly) free[1]. The walled garden social networks are like Coke (or sugary water) or polluted air in comparison. Aren't there any poets here, who could pen a few couplets in his memory & respect? Just saying RIP to such a great Engineer, feels so not enough. Feel proud to call myself an Engineer, when such giants also call them one. [1] - we have freedom via choice. If you use gmail/yahoo/etc you know you are doing a trade off. But its comforting to have choice.

mattdeboard 11y ago

What's the criteria for the black band at the top of the page when a tech luminary passes away?

ericfrederich 11y ago

Too bad he never got to see it replaced with something like Google Wave

elcct 11y ago

100% of people who invented email, died.