I got my email address when I started college, in the early 90s. You didn't use it much except to communicate with people you knew in real life. It replaced l

I got my email address when I started college, in the early 90s. You didn't use it much except to communicate with people you knew in real life. It replaced letter-writing, certainly, but otherwise not a huge change. During college years, first we got Mosaic then Netscape, and more and more one went on-line to look for non-academic information, e.g., I remmeber when NYT on-line started. My first summer job in college, at the MIT Media Lab, was in a group where people were talking about building a mainframe, digitize movies, and serve (this was before "stream" became mainstream) them to people at home. I remember thinking: "Who'd pay for that?"