Email from the distant past
I was a graduate student in the Stanford Computer Science Department from 1968 through 1973. Starting in 1970, I worked at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), in a bucolic setting off Arastradero Road (now in the Arastradero Open Space Preserve). At the computer center on campus, we fed punch cards into big IBM machines. But at the AI Lab, we had a PDP-10 time sharing system, and we logged into terminals to write programs.
One program sent electronic mail messages to coworkers, what a concept! My earliest surviving Email is from a fellow student, dated 11/07/1972; all in upper case, of course (bits were very expensive back then, so character sets were smaller).
STEVE, I YOU LOG ON BEFORE I GET IN TOUCH WITH YOU, I NEED TO KNOW
HOW MUCH MONEY YOU HAVE COMING FROM ACM FOR A PHONE CALL. PERHAPS IT IS
EITHER $2.70 OR 4.05. CALL ME AT 493-1600 X568.
DICK SWEET
07-NOV-72
1350
1,RES
My girlfriend at the time was a graduate student at MIT. Stanford and MIT were connected via ARPANET, and an Email application provided mail between nodes starting in 1971. (The Wikipedia ARPANET page says 75% of ARPANET traffic by 1973 was Email.) On 3/01/1973, my girlfriend sent me the following Email:
STEVE- I HOPE YOU'LL GET THIS MESSAGE. YESTERDAY I STARTED
TO WRITE AND SOMETHING DIED IN THE MIDDLE (STANFORD OR THE
NET) I TALKED TO RICHARD YESTERDAY OVER THE NETWORK
AND THEN AT NIGHT ON THE WATS LINE. TO SEND ME MAIL YOU WRITE *MAI
GREI MESSAGE CONTROL C. (SOME FUNNY CHARACTERS TYPED OUT IN THAT
LINE I'M NOT SURE IT WILL MAKE SNESE. ) IF YOU DO GET THIS PERHAPS WE
CAN START COMMUNICATING THIS WAY. I HAVE BEEN ENJOYING YOUR LETTERS VERY MUCH.
ENOUGH FOR THE FIRST TRY. SI HOPE YOUR WORK IS GOING WELL,
THAT YOU WILL FIND A JOB HERE AD THAT I'LL HEAR FROM YOU AGAIN SOON.
LOVE, IRENE
02-MAR-73 1143 NET,GUE
TTY
01-MAR-73 1348 NET,GUE
These are my earliest surviving Emails, local and net-based. They survived thanks to a major effort by several people to preserve early SAIL filesystems, now online at saildart.org. Thanks to Bruce Baumgart, Les Earnest, Martin Frost, and all others involved.
