3 ms·

Email was invented in the early 60s. In 1975, you could move to a technology hub, get an arpanet account, and get a Xerox Alto which had both GUI and networking

by mahmud 17y ago

Email was invented in the early 60s. In 1975, you could move to a technology hub, get an arpanet account, and get a Xerox Alto which had both GUI and networking, an email program, a bitmap editor, games, and ran Smalltalk and Lisp. Inventing the future could be posh, if you're not a Unix weenie ;-)

mhb 17y ago
And soon after 1864, you could have been faxing documents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph
Maro 17y ago
Yes, but email wasn't universal. Today I can be sitting here in Budapest and do bussiness with people halfway across the globe, all per email. I couldn't do that in 1975. Of course I wouldn't need to. I'd just buy Microsoft stock and live off that in my penthouse suite. Well, that is until Marty McFly shows up... =)
- CWuestefeld 17y ago
  And even when it was available, the bandwidth was small enough that you were a little limited in what you could transfer, and how quickly it could get there. I remember circa 1989 when my school (RPI) got onto NYSERNET, at what I believe was a 56kbps link. How much correspondence can be shoved through a pipe that size? Around that same timeframe, outside of academia, us hobbyists that wanted more widespread communication were relying on things like FidoNet[1]. That would package up a BBS's messages and ship them out on a nightly basis -- to a limited number of nodes (I think), so it could take quite a while for messages to propagate to the entire network. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
  - zandorg 17y ago
    Actually, I had email on dialup in 1997, and you could download a modest amount of single user's email, and refresh newsgroups, in about 4 minutes flat.
rbanffy 17y ago
A Unix weenie would still have a good time back in 1975. But I have to agree some 70's technology puts to shame lots of stuff we have now. I am only half-joking when I say ST-80 makes Java'2010 look primitive.

by mahmud 17y ago

mhb 17y ago

And soon after 1864, you could have been faxing documents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph

Maro 17y ago

Yes, but email wasn't universal. Today I can be sitting here in Budapest and do bussiness with people halfway across the globe, all per email. I couldn't do that in 1975. Of course I wouldn't need to. I'd just buy Microsoft stock and live off that in my penthouse suite. Well, that is until Marty McFly shows up... =)

CWuestefeld 17y ago
And even when it was available, the bandwidth was small enough that you were a little limited in what you could transfer, and how quickly it could get there. I remember circa 1989 when my school (RPI) got onto NYSERNET, at what I believe was a 56kbps link. How much correspondence can be shoved through a pipe that size? Around that same timeframe, outside of academia, us hobbyists that wanted more widespread communication were relying on things like FidoNet[1]. That would package up a BBS's messages and ship them out on a nightly basis -- to a limited number of nodes (I think), so it could take quite a while for messages to propagate to the entire network. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
- zandorg 17y ago
  Actually, I had email on dialup in 1997, and you could download a modest amount of single user's email, and refresh newsgroups, in about 4 minutes flat.

rbanffy 17y ago

A Unix weenie would still have a good time back in 1975. But I have to agree some 70's technology puts to shame lots of stuff we have now. I am only half-joking when I say ST-80 makes Java'2010 look primitive.