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Message Digest
Volume 28 : Issue 80 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Re: History of AT&T Mail [TELECOM]
Re: History of AT&T Mail [TELECOM]
Re: History of AT&T Mail [TELECOM]
Re: Western Union public fax services, 1960
Re: History of AT&T Mail [TELECOM]
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Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:08:46 GMT
From: tlvp <PmUiRsGcE.TtHlEvSpE@att.net>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: History of AT&T Mail [TELECOM]
Message-ID: <49C4681A.1060207@att.net>
John Mayson wrote:
> When I was in college in the late 1980's I worked for AT&T as a co-op
> student. During my second quarter I was given the task of rolling out
> AT&T Mail to our site and training people how to use it. At the time
> I thought the service was pretty neat. It had email-to-fax and
> email-to-snail-mail gateways. It was used mostly by AT&T, but the
> service was available to the public and I found the governor of
> Kentucky listed in the directory. It didn't take me long to realize I
> could send email to @attmail.com from my school account, which raised
> a few eyebrows about me "hacking into AT&T Mail". When it came time
> to graduate I had promised myself I would get an AT&T Mail account if
> my future employer did not have Internet access (turns out they did).
>
> I was reminiscing about the service, so I visited Google and Wikipedia
> trying to find information. I cannot find anything. The search terms
> bring up information about today's at&t email service via their DSL
> service or really old archives containing messages from people with
> @attmail.com email addresses. Perhaps I'm the only person on the
> planet who thinks this topic is interesting, but in case I'm not, does
> anyone have more information about AT&T Mail? Until my last move I
> still had all of my manuals, but they're long gone. I want to create
> a Wikipedia entry. I believe AT&T Mail was as significant as
> Compuserve or Prodigy.
>
> John
I still pine for both AT&T Mail and MCI Mail. For what it's worth,
I believe I still retain a copy of Vint Cerf's final, wistful,
shut-down/farewell message, sent to all remaining MCI Mail customers
sometime within the last few hours before the plug got pulled,
and can try to dig it out and post it here, if desired.
Cheers, -- tlvp (still encumbered with *both* services' manuals :-) )
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:13:40 -0400
From: MC <for.address.look@www.ai.uga.edu.slash.mc>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: History of AT&T Mail [TELECOM]
Message-ID: <cXaxl.18683$v8.14026@bignews3.bellsouth.net>
hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
>> ***** Moderator's Note *****
> 4) Social correspondence--cheap telephony has killed off what was left
> of this, but the Internet is finishing the job. This year, with
> things rushed, I couldn't get and send out birthday cards to some
> friends, but sent an email instead. Tacky, but did the job.
> The web allows sharing of family pictures electronically instead of
> mailing prints.
Actually even e-mail and web pages are passé. My daughter received a
wedding invitation, and then notification that the wedding was called
off, via (I think) Facebook.
I am not on Facebook. Whatever they do there, they're going to do
without me.
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:50:24 -0500
From: Jim Haynes <haynes@giganews.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: History of AT&T Mail [TELECOM]
Message-ID: <slrngsao95.3tq.haynes@localhost.localdomain>
On 2009-03-20, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
> A related question is: When did email--using today's standards--
> begin? That is, when did people get email addresses of "PERSON@SITE"
> and there was an Internet capable of routing such messages to the
> appropriate site.
I believe the person@site style of addressing goes back to the Arpanet,
so you could research it in the Request For Comments RFC archives.
Originally there was a hosts table that related site names to IP
addresses. Around the same time that Arpanet was turning into the Internet
there was the beginning of the Domain Name System with the now-familiar
hierarchical dotted site names and the name servers that replaced the
hosts table. These are related because the Arpanet was small enough for
the hosts table to be maintained and centrally administered; but when
the Internet was opened up to many more users it became impossible to
maintain the name->address mapping as a table. I once wrote a piece
comparing the domain name system with the telephone information operator
system as it was back then. Your local information operator had numbers
for your area code, and would ask you "what city?". If you needed a
number for a distant area code you had to dial that area code before
the information number. And then much earlier than that the information
operation was even less centralized, so that each city or exchange would
have its own information operators.
***** Moderator's Note *****
I never forget the day that I saw a letter cart filled to overflowing
with DNS requests in Jon Postel's office, with a sign on it that said
"I'm giving up control!" - I asked him what it was, of course, and he
told me that everyone had finally convinced him that DNS had grown too
large for him to manage personally.
Only the good die young.
Bill Horne Temporary Moderator
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:55:54 -0500
From: Jim Haynes <haynes@giganews.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Western Union public fax services, 1960
Message-ID: <slrngsaojg.3tq.haynes@localhost.localdomain>
It's interesting that the founders of FedEx discovered and filled a market
niche for overnight delivery of things that can't be faxed.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:55:42 GMT
From: "Tony Toews \[MVP\]" <ttoews@telusplanet.net>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: History of AT&T Mail [TELECOM]
Message-ID: <dp2bs4hm29e7difidio5vb2vpgo8nrc11f@4ax.com>
John Mayson <john@mayson.us> wrote:
In about 1989 or so I knew email was going to be a good thing. I was then accessing
Compuserve and local BBSs. I talked to Telus, the then provincial telco and was
able to get an X.400 email address with which I experimented sending email to the
Compuservice account and so forth. Both CompuServe and this X.400 service was
available via the X.25 packet network accessible at the blistering speed of 2400 bps.
But there was no one else available to email to so I dropped it. Expensive at about
$50 per month IIRC.
I may have used an X.400 to fax gateway to send a fax for a small contest involving
the person who was the furthest away to send a fax. I won. However the prize was a
roll of fax paper so that was quite useless to me.
Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Please respond only in the newsgroups so that others can
read the entire thread of messages.
Microsoft Access Links, Hints, Tips & Accounting Systems at
http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/
------------------------------
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End of The Telecom digest (5 messages)
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