My very first email, from 1993

[lethargic_man]

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*).

Comments

[lnr]

<3

[lethargic_man]

Thanks for your reaction, but you're not exactly the generation to be impressed by an email from that period... ;^)

[lnr]

My first email account was in September 1994, so I'm not so much *impressed* as nostalgic! And of course while I was at the Other Place I now work in Cambridge IT, so my social nostalgia does extend to phoenix too.

I never had a bigendian address mind. By 1994 they were still familiar, but largely obsolescent.

I have mail going back to 2002 at work, 2006 on chiark, 2004 on Google. I think I'll have to dig into archives to find anything older.

[lnr]

I have found mail from djsd in June 1995 with advice on how to drive my strn killfile :)

I seem not to have kept sent-mail from that period.

[lethargic_man]

That sounds relatively hardcore; at the time I was in a four-year break between being a teenage computer nerd and setting out to be a professional software engineer, and didn't know very much about computers apart from the by then obsolete BBC Micro (and to a lesser extent its successor the Acorn Archimedes). I have a vague memory the newsreader I was using at the time was called Trumpet. As you can probably tell from the name, it wasn't written for Unix/Linux, but rather Windows.