Welcome to my blog. I’ll start with an explanation of the name of the blog. That was my Email address when I first joined Bear Stearns back in the late 1980’s. Yes, that was before most people knew what Email was, and before most people consider the Internet to exist. Back in those days Email was delivered from computer to computer via UUCP (Unix to Unix CoPy) over the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) or standard dial-up phone lines, mostly at night when the long-distance costs were less. (Yes, in those old days telephone calls were charged for by time of day, length of call and distance from caller to receiver). Each computer only contacted a small number of other computers, so you needed a path from your computer to the recipient’s computer when sending Email. To simplify the process there was a UUCP mapping project which collected the list of computers and which other computers they exchanged Email with. Using the path mapping information and programs like pathalias you could find the path from your computer to any other computer which was listed and then create the path. In the case of sol!ursa!ari, sol was a well-known computer at Columbia University which our computer at Bear Stearns (ursa) called nightly to exchange Emails. Thus, I only needed to start my Email path with sol for most others to be able to find me. I was the user ari on the computer ursa which exchanged Email with the well-known computer sol.
More about this, and lots of other things, in future posts.
Looking forward to reading your blog. I found your introduction interesting.
In those early days did email provide any actual benefit over physical delivery of docs/data or did it feel more like a novelty you all were trying out?
Hi Q,
The famous comment about that is “never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway”. I had no other way of getting the files I needed than by Email, and I wouldn’t have wanted to type in a 1,000+ line program from a hard-copy if it had been sent to me via snail mail. Even within Bear Stearns there were times when Emailing someone on another floor was faster than walking up/down the stairs to talk to them, and Email had/has the advantage that it is asynchronous. The recipient doesn’t have to take the time immediately to answer a phone call, they could/can reply when it is convenient for them. I think that is a large part of why Email has become so universal in our current society.
Thanks for asking, and for taking the time to read this nonsense,
Ari