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hilarious > Electronic mail on the Arpanet is indeed a nice gizmo, but it is unlikely it will ever be diffused outside academic circles and public laboratories
by paulsutter 4y ago
hilarious
> Electronic mail on the Arpanet is indeed a nice gizmo, but it is unlikely it will ever be diffused outside academic circles and public laboratories—environments in which the need to maintain confidentiality is scarcely pressing. Laboratories with military contracts will never communicate through the Arpanet! Either normal people or small companies will be able to afford a VAX each, or the market for electronic mail will remain tiny
- junofan 4y agoThis electronic mail scheme just sounds like a slower and worse version of connecting to an IBM mainframe in Poughkeepsie.
- GTP 4y agoMy father witnessed an instance of this. At the early days of the Internet, he purchased a tech magazine and so he ended up talking about all the new possibilities that the Internet was offering, including emails. His friend said: "Yeah, but this things are not going to last: people will always prefer to send a fax".
- codegeek 4y agoPlot twist. Fax is not dead yet even in 2022. I was at the DMV and they asked for something to be faxed. Yes, faxed unless I could produce the original in front.
- quercusa 4y agoBecause nobody could create a fake document and then fax it?
- OJFord 4y agoMaybe they're going for plausible deniability - 'yeah, that could be a faxed copy of the original, and I am receiving it over fax, so it could never be original' vs. 'this is clearly not the original'... The irony of course is that any non-original copy of a document presented in person is a 'fax' (facsimile)!
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago> Either normal people or small companies will be able to afford a VAX each Well, that is what happened. PCs were definitely as powerful as the older VAXes right around time the Internet opened for business. They just weren't running the VAX OS.