I got into email in 1997. A colleague (and fellow author), the late Frank Bren who many Australians may remember on TV, introduced me to Hotmail and kindly set up my first address. I have it written down somewhere, but for reasons I've long ago forgotten it shut down on me about 2004. I still had files on it I would like to have. Alas, those are surely gone to some place in the universe, maybe to be retrieved by Martians or Venutians or some other life form in the far-flung outer universe. My loss, their gain.
In 2004 Frank Bren (then in Hong Kong for an extended stay) was hacked by shysters in the Philippines who got into his Hotmail and took his addresses and sent everyone an email citing an "emergency" and asking for urgent money. We all knew he wasn't in Manila so AFAIK nobody bit the hook. This was very upsetting to him as he had to email everyone to say he was alive and well and not bankrupt in Manila or Cebu. In some ways he never fully recovered from this experience, and I can understand it, he had hundreds of names on his address list.
I was then with Yahoo and I too had similar problems. There were two hacking attempts, fortunately without any loss to me, I've long kept a separate address only for my banking emails. Nobody at Yahoo was in the least interested in assisting, so we gave up on them. I closed my two Y addresses and returned to Hotmail and I've stayed there since. It's a tad 'academic' for many, but the simplicity of its operation suits me. I'm definitely a KISS
👍 type.
Now retired, I make more use of emails than I do of my mobile phone. Here in Indonesia my home internet is unlimited and costs a whopping
$30 a month. Someone smarter than me connected my Australian phone to my internet. Good one.
Interesting to note a friend in Melbourne who recently passed away kept his one and only email address from 1995 or 1996. He was with AAPT - does anyone in Australia still remember them? - and he stayed with that provider from day one. For reasons unknown AAPT ceased billing him for the service about a decade ago - maybe in recognition of his being their oldest customer, ha! - so he had years of free internet.
Messaging account on Dockmaster/DARPANET. 1986?
Gee, golly, gosh, that is ANCIENT! How many of you were there on that site back then? My guess is about six.
It must have been a lot like trying to make a phone call on a party line in the 1950s...
I was working on computers for clients who had some sort of early online capacity, in the early 1980s. But I don't recall anyone using it for external emails. Internal company matters, yes. Like a chat box. I had very limited computer/internet skills (it took me at least two years to stop putting manual returns at the end of every line in letters, reports etc written on an IBM PC) but many executives would call on me to delete their 'sensitive' emails as they didn't know how to do it. I learned many corporate secrets from this small chore.
As an aside thought, I find it amazing (and amusing) that a majority of people on our planet have no idea what life was like before Facebook.
