Remember that e-mail system we built while at UD in the early eighties? It was a kludge, but it was a novel idea for most students to leave messages for each other on the computer.
Er ... as I recall, that you wrote and I just suggested a small improvement to (or have I forgotten more than I think I have?). Yeah, though it paled in comparison to the UNIX mail program and UUCP that I got exposed to later, at the time just being able to leave messages for each other on the school computer was very useful -- and as you point out, a novel idea for most of us, since email just wasn't one of those things most people had heard of yet, even us geeklets.
(For the folks who weren't there: the university had an HP-3000 running MPE, and a 'terminal ward' for the students with four CRT terminals and a DECwriter (printing terminal kinda like a wide-carriage, dot-matrix TeleType). If anybody had a computer in hir dorm room or at home, it was in the Apple II / TRS-80 Model I range (I can only remember one person having a computer in the dorm while I was there) and didn't talk to any other computers, and the school computer didn't talk to any other computers -- UUCP was just for UNIX then, AFAIK, and most of us hadn't heard of UNIX yet anyhow. Being a small university -- a liberal arts college, a business school, and a seminary -- we were far, far down the ladder from the small number of sites attached to ARPAnet, BITnet, CSnet, etc. Some of us had the foresight to be able to dream of someday sending email to friends at other schools (I don't think any of us quite got as far as envisioning the ubiquitous email of today), but even just being able to post private messages to each other in a central location -- since most of the folks we'd want to leave messages for were in the group that haunted the 'terminal ward' daily -- rather than walking to somebody else's dorm to slip a note under the door, even that was a Really Cool Thing when dmk unveiled her program.)
I remember getting my first piece of email from outside the university and thinking "Wow, this is really cool! But who else do I know that I can send email to?" (A contemporary parallel might be "But who else bikes to work?" Not the majority of people I know.) And you had to know the "bang-path" – you had to route the email through all the servers between yourself and your recipient. It really wasn't something the masses were going to adopt. And each of those "hops" in the path was a phone call between servers, and toll calls weren't cheap then. Delivery to other sites typically took hours, sometimes days.
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(For the folks who weren't there: the university had an HP-3000 running MPE, and a 'terminal ward' for the students with four CRT terminals and a DECwriter (printing terminal kinda like a wide-carriage, dot-matrix TeleType). If anybody had a computer in hir dorm room or at home, it was in the Apple II / TRS-80 Model I range (I can only remember one person having a computer in the dorm while I was there) and didn't talk to any other computers, and the school computer didn't talk to any other computers -- UUCP was just for UNIX then, AFAIK, and most of us hadn't heard of UNIX yet anyhow. Being a small university -- a liberal arts college, a business school, and a seminary -- we were far, far down the ladder from the small number of sites attached to ARPAnet, BITnet, CSnet, etc. Some of us had the foresight to be able to dream of someday sending email to friends at other schools (I don't think any of us quite got as far as envisioning the ubiquitous email of today), but even just being able to post private messages to each other in a central location -- since most of the folks we'd want to leave messages for were in the group that haunted the 'terminal ward' daily -- rather than walking to somebody else's dorm to slip a note under the door, even that was a Really Cool Thing when
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