1977: “What the Heck is Electronic Mail?”
In last night’s The Internet Course the student panel did an excellent job sparking discussion around the social, economic, and cultural impacts of the internet. It made me think how remarkable it is that almost forty years later e-mail is still “the killer app.” So, as we’re talking about the impacts of the internet over the past forty years, I couldn’t help but think of this 1977 Honeywell advertisement Tim Owens shared with me a few weeks back.
Email was the application that helped people grok how the internet would dramatically shift the foundation of communication technologies in the future. In fact, in the late 1960s Donald Davies conceptualized an early vision of the internet as way of re-imagining the British postal system, something Ray Tomlinson’s invention of email in 1971 fully realized.
I think a much younger Angelina Jolie said it best:
