4 ms·
Email is a different kettle of fish. It got in there first and only really competed with snail mail. Other alternatives were arguably more complicated. There
by wicket 8y ago
Email is a different kettle of fish. It got in there first and only really competed with snail mail. Other alternatives were arguably more complicated. There was no easier alternative to fall back on. If you wanted to communicate on the internet, you had to use email, and by the time there were alternatives, it had a large enough user-base which meant that it was never simply going to be displaced.
- beachwood23 8y agoI could be wrong here, but I believe that for most ordinary people, AOL messaging and even CompuServe boards were in common use before Email. The email "standard" had to displace those.
- wicket 8y agoI never used CompuServe forums but my understanding is that they were public internet forums, not exactly something that could be used for personal/private messaging. Newsgroups (often used with an email client) pre-dated CompuServe forums by a decade and I'm pretty sure they had a much larger user-base. AOL Instant Messenger didn't come out until 1997, email was already in heavy use by then.