[inforoots] early email

[Peter Capek]

While it wasn't exactly electronic as we presently use that term, there was
a much earlier
example of computing-device-based mail which isn't widely known.   The
machines provided by
Hollerith for that effort had a drawer built into them, intended to be used
to communicate information
about the progress of the work  But at least a few enterprising operators
used the opportunity to
communicate with a partner - or unknown - of the other gender.
Unfortunately, addressability was
limited to the operator assigned to the same machine, and inevitably,
communication suffered as workers
were re-assigned.

No information is available about the degree of success achieved.

                     Peter Capek



On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 7:48 AM, Tom Van Vleck <thvv at multicians.org> wrote:

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> Interesting discussion of early electronic mail.
>
> As soon as there were files on disk, people left notes for
> each other in them; I remember doing this in 1964 on MIT's CTSS
> to communicate with other users, by writing a file named
> something like TO JOHN.
>
> The idea of using the computer for mail was popular in the 1960s.
> Several time-sharing systems had some kind of mail command.
> Noel Morris and I wrote the MAIL command for CTSS, which had
> a user community of hundreds of users, some distant from MIT,
> in summer 1965.  There is a note describing my recollections at
>    http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html
> The note covers a lot of history of early computer mail and
> related topics.
>
> I have been working on a page with more details: it is not
> publicly linked but you may be interested in
>    http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-details.html
> which has the CTSS manual excerpts for MAIL and messaging,
> and the MAD language source of MAIL.  I am looking for a
> copy of Programming Staff Note 49, by Pouzin, Schroeder,
> and Crisman, which proposed a MAIL facility for the purpose
> of allowing machine room operators to tell users their files
> had been retrieved.  Noel and I generalized the idea to allow
> any user to send any message to any other user.
>
> I believe the SDC timesharing system had a MAIL command in
> the mid 1960s  as well, and probably other timesharing systems
> did too.
>
>
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