Do NOT file this one under July 24th celebrations. I could not resist posting this quote from the June 1982 Friend magazine. It is a description of how ”you may soon be able to send instantaneous messages to anyone else in the world who has a computer like yours.”
Yes, the possibilities are almost unlimited—and growing bigger minute by minute. For example, with the proper “connections,” you may soon be able to send instantaneous messages to anyone else in the world who has a computer like yours. Your first step would be to type in some key word, such as SPECIAL DELIVERY, after which the computer would ask you for the person’s “address,” probably some code number. Then, after typing out your message, you would instruct the computer to send it on its way with another key word such as RUSH. Before you could blink, the message would be at its destination. But what if the person you were writing to weren’t home? Just like a letter, your message would be stored in an electric “mailbox” in a large central computer somewhere, awaiting your friend’s return so he could instruct his computer to OPEN MAIL.
The article is Frontiers of Science: The Computers Are Coming! The Computers Are Coming! written by Dr. Sherwood B. Idso. It really makes me feel old that I can remember life without email.
~~Matia Bryson
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