About Email addresses

If you think Email is a recent novelty, invented together with the internet, you should read the following.

Look what I found here.   This is the telegram alias of the Neuberger company.   Click on the picture and you'll see they nicely reserved the alias "Voltmeter",  and used that back in 1935!

Here is some history about email, when you're interested
The first email was send by Mr. Gauss (yes, the magnetism "Gauss") in 1832. He was the first to transmit a written message online over a long distance, by means of serial electronic data transmission.

Do you know what AOL means? It means America On Line? When you already knew that, then perhaps you also know when America went online? It was in 1858 when the first sea cable between Europe and America was successfully installed. So from now on phone calls, and digital data transmission were possible over this line. Unfortunately it worked only a few weeks, and the cable got leaky and stopped working.
Today, you can write an email from your mobile phone, but actually that's nothing very new. Already on the Titanic, you could go to the communication center, and had an email send by the telegraphist, who would be send to the nearest coast guard, who retransmits it electronically to the next post office, etc, and in the end it got printed on a type writer, and hand-carry that paper to the receiving person. You had to pay a fortune per letter, perhaps like 500$ of todays value, per word. The Titanic's equipment was the most powerful in use at the time, and fed from the ship's lighting circuit.

Around 1922, an email system was established in any post office on the world. For an amount of 25$ you could have a short message being send to anybody who has a telex receiver in his company, or otherwise have it send to his nearest post office, where it would print out automatically, and then was send to the receiver by normal mail, the same day, or privately hand-carried there for some extra charge. The official rate of the Berlin Post office 1922 was: 1 DM per word, plus 10DM basic charge.

In 1938 all German government sites were internally inter-connected by Telex. It worked like today's email, only the employees had no personal email system on their desk, but they had to go to the TELEX lady, who send it for them.

 


Somebody writing an email in the post office 1951, using a Telex machine

Here is a picture of a Telex machine, and it does all you computer does now, when you wite a text-only email.

On the right side you see a something like phone but it's a dial only. You had to dial the number of the receiver. This is the email address. On the receiving end, a similar machine would respond. (something like pick up the phone) Then when the connection is made, you can start to type the message, which is send by ASCII to the receiver, and printed out automatically. (See the paper roll at the top). As far as I can see the only difference with today's email is that is, it sends while you write it. Today, the internet based email still uses the ASCII code. This is a modernized version of Mr. Gauss' invention of 1832. Believe it or not, but when I started working for Hewlett Packard, I received purchase orders from some customers, send on machines like this, still in 1992.

So if you think, the big difference between now and then is, that you can send pictures too by email, and not only text, then read this. Pictures were transmitted over (some) distance at first by Mr. Nipkow, who scanned a picture in a mechanical way, and showed the result of that on a projector screen which could be as far away as the line would carry the electronic signal. The first official electronic transmission of a picture into some other part of the world was in 1930 from Berlin to Nanking, China. The signal was send by short wave Radio transmission.

Hewlett Packard had a worldwide internal email system called HP-Desk, developed in the 1970's, and ran on the HP150 personal computer. The data connection was by a permanent telephone connection between each site. It worked just the same as today's email.  You could send text,  and add graphic files, or data.   Really just NO difference whatsoever with today's email,  only it was very expensive.  A manager could use it at home or hotel, via modem.  When you visited  another HP office, you could do your email there if you wanted.  They spied on you too.  Your manager could read your email, and mosz managers didn't tell the employees. My manager was very upset that this was possible at all, and warned me for it. Because the next manager can read HIS email too. Later this was forbidden by law, because it was regarded "post" by law, with all the rights if of the sender and the receiver. So they had to obsolete this remarkable feature.