Talk:Email: Difference between revisions

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Please look at the bottom of this [1] page, on Donald Knuth's homepage. From there it is clear that using 'e-mail' as opposed to 'email' is anti-American, so if we prefer not to subject ourselves to massive aerial bombardments, and avoid the faith of the teachers unions and the pro-choice crowd [2], I think it might be better if we use 'email' primarily. Sorry for the sarcasm:) I'm just trying to attract attention because I agree with professor Knuth's comment and I think it'd be better to converge towards using 'email' and not 'e-mail'. --Nimc 19:12, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)

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There was a sentence here saying something to the effect that e-mail has essentially replaced Morse code. That's like saying jet airplanes replaced the horse and buggy, without mentioning the bicycle, cars, buses, and everything else. The telegraph was all but replaced already by the telephone. E-mail has hardly made a dent in that. --LDC

Useful intermediate points between telegrams and email would be not the telephone, but rather telex and fax. Like email and telegrams -- and unlike telephone -- these are textual and message-based media rather than bidirectional voice media.

It seems to me that email is replacing fax, much as fax displaced telex, to some extent in business. One empirical measure of this would be what contact information people place on their business cards -- once it was phone and telex; then phone and fax; now frequently either phone, fax, and email or simply phone and email.

(I actually dealt with a telex-to-email gatewaying issue last year, which rather surprised me -- I had no idea my workplace was still using telex!) --FOo 15:12, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Although the social problems of email links are useful, they could be slightly more useful by being more than a linklist. Ought to get on to that one sometime... -- User:Bbtommy

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John G. Kemeny (late former President of Dartmouth College and co-inventor of BASIC once told me (in 1985) in a private conversation that, although he could not prove it, he believed that the earliest use of computers for person-to-person messaging occurred in 1964, on DTSS (the Dartmouth Time Sharing System). While not email, per se, the story could add some background. Apparently, a male Dartmouth student set up a shared file for exchanging text messages with his girlfriend. That's all it was, but it served a purpose. Dartmouth was all-male at the time, and the girlfriend was able to access the system via teletype from the all-female college in Massachusetts that she was attending. Dr. Kemeny remarked that this story proved that motivated students were the best innovators... after all, what greater motivation could there be?

Is this worth noting here? If not, how about if I get corroboration? I've found a web site ([3]) dedicated to discussions amongst the programmers who developed DTSS, and one of them may be able to verify the story.

I'd say no, because it wasn't a mechanism created intended for general use. Also, there were probably other instances of something like this, which will of course be undocumented because they were personal, and it would be unfair to call out this particular one. Noel 18:56, 8 Sep 2003 (UTC)

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Should discuss attachments. --Daniel C. Boyer 16:12, 9 Sep 2003 (EDT)

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Just noticed that there's no mention of X.400, FidoNet, early private email networks like MCIMail, or of email on on-line services like CompuServe and AOL (before they offered Internet access). I think I'll start working on filling in a few of these blanks. Rhsatrhs 13:19, 17 Sep 2003 (UTC)

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Currently says:

A modern Internet e-mail address is a string of the form jsmith@corporation.com. It should be read as "jsmith at corporation.com". The first part is the username of the person, and the second part is the domain name (hostname) of the computer in which that person has an e-mail account.

If no one objects, I will soon replace that with:

A modern Internet e-mail address is a string of the form jsmith@corporation.com. It should be read as "jsmith at corporation dot com". The part after the at-sign is the domain name (hostname) of a particular computer. The part before the at-sign indicates a particular account (username) of a person who uses that computer.

-- DavidCary 19:33, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

That paragraph has three mistakes: the part after the @ is not necessarily a hostname nor does it necessarily correspond to a particular computer; the part before the @ does not necessarily correspond to an account or username. Now fixed. Gdr 16:26, 2004 May 14 (UTC)

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