I received an email from Yahoo! that started with: "We appreciate that you have been with Yahoo! Mail for the past 13 years." I had to stop. How long did they say? Thirteen years? Have I been using Yahoo! that long?
Then I realized that I have been with Hotmail even longer; over 14 years. I created a Hotmail address on March 29, 1997, just 8 months after it's initial release by Bhatia and Smith and 9 months before it was bought by Microsoft.
Then I remembered the good old days when I hated ccMail and Pine so wrote my own email system using Bash around mail (the Unix email client) and vi (a Unix text editor) to send emails (it managed contacts and group emails) and elm to read them. That was in 1996.
Then I remember that the first time I actually used email was on an IBM mainframe using green scary eye-soring monochrome monitors. That was in 1991.
Then I realized I am getting old.
Then I realized that I have been with Hotmail even longer; over 14 years. I created a Hotmail address on March 29, 1997, just 8 months after it's initial release by Bhatia and Smith and 9 months before it was bought by Microsoft.
Then I remembered the good old days when I hated ccMail and Pine so wrote my own email system using Bash around mail (the Unix email client) and vi (a Unix text editor) to send emails (it managed contacts and group emails) and elm to read them. That was in 1996.
Then I remember that the first time I actually used email was on an IBM mainframe using green scary eye-soring monochrome monitors. That was in 1991.
Then I realized I am getting old.
Hi, I am Nauman Faridi, an IT professional and a Toastmaster from the foothills of Himalayas. Faridinama is a place for me to vent my feelings.
5 comments:
Good ol' days.
My first exposure to email was using Pegasus mail as Client and the email provider was sdnpk. That was a project of UNDP for development of such infrastructure in Pakistan. The mail used to cost in bytes sent and received and guess what, I once accidentally sent pictures through that email. My email bill for that month was somewhere around Rs. 500.
A friend once told me about a mutual friend of ours who had this SDNPK account in the early days of this project. He used to go to the center every day to send emails and check on the replies from the previous day. Now we get impatient when we don't get a reply email from a BB user instantly.
Another interesting story:
My roommate Sultan and I subscribed to CompuServe Internet Services in 1992 (after we bought an IBM 286 with 2 MB RAM for $1,400). We both created our email addresses and, since we didn't know anyone else with an email address, exchanged emails between ourselves. Our email addresses were something like 3456,6547@...
I created my first email address in 99 on Hotmail.
Khatlani here:
@Amir Butt: yeah my first email account was with sdnpk as well using pegasus in 1997 probably :) and after that when i first used hyper terminal on windows 95, to share files i was thrilled, after writing something #A1 so that the computer connects to the caller's computer on 1st call instead of phone keep on ringing.
@Faridi: sir jee, talk of vi editor, i never was able to memorize vi commands and always had to look on the back wall where the commands were written on a board in lab, where we used to do work on dummy terminals, and the lab was used to close by 3 o' clock in university :)
And the real hell was using Fortran77 to write a small function :) We made area of circle function in fortran and then in pascal, and wondered why we are not using GW Basic for these things :D
and in those days, monochrome monitors were a priviledge, otherwise a normal monitor was supposed to be black & white :)
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