First Email Address

I was driving home from dropping my son off at school this morning and somehow my mind wandered to the first email address I ever had.   I don’t know what the address was, because at the time, in 1990, I didn’t really get the distinction.   I was working for IBM and had an address on the mainframe that was called your “Inbox”.   We could send mail back and forth to the people we worked with as well as anyone who worked for IBM that had their own Inbox.

It was a bit later, when I was coordinating the software beta program that I found out I had an Internet Email address equivalent for my Inbox.   Not everyone had one of these, because back then the Internet and email presence worldwide was in its infancy.  I needed one because I had to distribute the beta version of our product to the something like eighty customers world-wide every time we dropped a new beta test version.

There were about fifty people working on the product—it wasn’t a small endeavor from IBM, but at the time, the total size of the beta fit on seventeen 3.5” floppy disks.   I packed up each floppy disk into something similar to a .zip file, build a distribution list of the beta customers and then sent an email to them with the files attached.

I did this on a green screen terminal interface on the mainframe, which was how we did all our mail and communication.  Once I sent the email, there was no indication that things were happening or that the files were being transferred, so I went home and waited for customer responses in the following days, hoping fiercely that I hadn’t messed anything up on my end and all was sent out well.

The following morning our manager had been contacted though: who had sent the email to all the people with the “huge” attachments?   It had taken up 90% of the communication bandwidth for the day.   Did we plan on doing it again (yes) and if so, they needed to talk to us about how to do so in a way that wouldn’t repeatedly send the same thing eighty times, but instead use some optimization routine so that it would only leave the IBM system once and then branch out to each Internet email address.

We sent many more beta versions of the product before it was released, taking hours to get around the globe.   Today the same amount of data could make it there in seconds.   I wonder what that email address was though that I used to communicate on the Internet back in 1990.

The Big Boy Update:  Uncle Bob came to visit last week and brought with him some new flannel sheets for my son.   I’d been meaning to put them on for the past several days but kept forgetting until tonight just before bed.   When my son climbed up into his top bunk tonight he said, “Yo!  It looks awesome!”  He and his father told my daughter about all the things on the sheets, including “trees and bears and porcupines and acorns and foxes and pine cones…and a bird” as my son described it.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is on the bottom bunk of the bunk of the bunk beds she and her brother share.   She recently has wanted to have blankets covering up the side so it feels like she’s in a tent or enclosed place.   It’s nice and cozy in there; I think if I was a child I’d like it too.