Why a man called Ray has much to answer for

RAY Tomlinson of Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) has much for which to answer.

He is the man who shot off the very first electronic mail in 1971 and, although he doesn’t quite recall, it may have been coded “Test123” or “QWERTYUIOP,” whatever that means.

Thanks Ray!

At that time facsimile machines were still far away, and when they did arrive I was overjoyed that my board acceded to my request to acquire one of these new gadgets.

Imagine the very concept: one inserts a document into the machine, it shoots words and images into outer space and arrives as the same document anywhere in the world.

Mind you it was still some time before faxed documents were accepted as being “legal” and more recently scanned documents endured the same scrutiny.

Reading telegrams at weddings was doomed, although in the transition some masters of ceremony pretended the “old yellows” still existed.

Seven years later, Digital Equipment Corporation’s Gary Thuerk sent an “email blast” to 400 potential buyers and sold $13 million worth of computers.

I do hope the CEOs at Australia Post and Telstra were well prepared for this as a revolution was just around the corner.

Although, having said that, I expect one of them wasn’t prepared given the price of a standard postage stamp doubled and shortly after went up by a further 10%.

The internet went “live” in 1991, and on American Independence Day five years later Hotmail launched the first free web-based email service making all of us dependent rather than independent.

The current world population is around eight billion and every second woman, man and child in that number has an email account.

The thing about emails is that they are not well behaved; they do not follow a nine to five communication regime nor do they cease on weekends and public holidays.

Indeed emails mate at night to give you a not welcome surprise every morning.

Our inboxes have no base and those damned messages keep piling up.

Annoyingly 50% of them are “spam” which means “send multiple unsolicited messages” rather than our well-loved SPAM meat product which originates from “spiced ham”.

It would be nice to think my email communication with a wealthy Nigerian widow could lead to my bank account swelling by some three hundred million Nigerian Naira, around $A1 million, but I suspect that won’t be the case.

I’ve talked to a few business people around town and they complain about the volume of emails; indeed one leading business leader told me he doesn’t open them anymore and added, “If someone wants to talk to me they can use the phone.”

Can’t blame him really.