My very first email, from 1993

I dug out something the other day from an email from 1998; my conversation partner was impressed my email archive went back that far. I said it goes back to 1993, but anything before 1997 I only have in hardcopy (stop laughing!). After that, I went searching for my very first email, and here it is.

Back in 1992, I applied for an account on my university' mainframe. I was the very last year to have to apply for one; from the following year, all new students would automatically get an email account on the mainframe's replacement system. For the next year, I contented myself with sending messages to my fellow students using the internal messaging system; it wasn't until the start of the '93–'94 academic year that I tried sending an email through the Internet (or exploring what else I could do, which is how I discovered Usenet).

Here's a printout of that email, along with the reply I got, which gives the date: Monday 11 October 1993. Worth noting are the big-endian email addresses, something that hasn't been seen for decades now, and the fact that when I sent it, I wasn't even sure what my own email address was! Don't ask why I had set my name in the "From" field to "Fortescue Siegfried" (and then managed to misspell it *cringe*).

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