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Was Email an Accident?

This Email-Marketing Article is Brought To You By: Melih Oztalay
(Posted on: 2006-04-29)

Recently, I had the opportunity to travel in my local university's time machine (SHHH! Don't tell anyone- it's a super secret, black ops Defense Department contract that not even the President knows about). Because of the way my week had gone as I tried to work online- and it hadn't gone well, mostly because of the unwanted truckload of unsolicited commercial email I kept finding in my inbox- I decided to take advantage of this once in a lifetime chance to return to 1971. Why, you ask? Because that's where I could find Ray Tomlinson, generally recognized as the father of public email. I wanted some answers that would address my frustration, and since he birthed this child, he was the one to ask.

I found him working late at his computer- well actually, he was a floor above the computer that filled up a room down downstairs. He was working on what was then called his "dumb terminal" which was nothing more than a one color screen and keyboard which was wired into the mainframe. I said, "Ray, I've got a few questions for you." He jumped when I spoke since he didn't know I was there. He seemed concerned that I might do him some harm so I reassured him that if he would just answer a few questions for me, I'd leave peacefully and never bother him again. He, a little wary, agreed.

Q: "Ray, why does it seem that I get email every day from people I don't even know and don't want to read what they say?"
A: "What are you talking about? What's email?"

Q: "Come on, Ray, don't avoid the question!" Tell me how everyone I don't want to have my email address knows it even before my friends and family get it?
A: "Look, I'm in the dark here."

Q: "How could a man like you invent something that let's every scumbag on the planet send stuff to my nine year old kid that I'm even too embarrassed to look at? And why can they send me ads for pills and potions that don't work and never will and I didn't ask for?"
A: "Hey look buddy, I don't know who you are, but...

Q: "Listen Ray, the stuff I get keeps trying to get me to give them my personal information so they can steal money from me and put me in the poorhouse. Why did you let that happen?"
A: Listen now, I...

Q: "Ray, stop trying to weasel out of this! You know what I'm talking about. The last virus I got- through one of your well-engineered emails- took my computer down for over a week! It cost me several hundred dollars to get it cleaned and up and running again, not to mention that my online store was out of business the whole time. That cost me thousands!
A: "Look, I don't know anything about email or online stores. What is that anyway? What's "online?" And why are you here. I didn't invent email or online anything. I don't even know what they are.

Q: Are you serious? You know that little program you wrote that let someone at one computer talk to someone else at another one?
A: Yes, but...

Q: Well that's email, Ray. Why didn't you just write the program correctly so that none of this could happen to me and everyone else who uses it?
A: I'm a little confused- how many people are using it?

Q: Over a billion of us all around the world.
A: A billion! You can't mean it. What for? I mean, all it does is leave notes for the guy I'm working with.

Q: Sure, Ray, sure. Act like you don't know what you've done. Why didn't you just do it right in the first place?

You are reading this Special Report because you have a sense of the problems you face with public email. You may be new to internet communications or you may not be, but for anyone paying attention, the news that people are finding their online experience to be more frustrating and less productive than it used to be is not really news. It's obvious to those of us who are internet savvy, and to the internet/email "newbies," as well, it may not be quite what you had hoped for.

Let's begin by taking a step back in time to the beginning of the email age in 1971.

Something you may not remember- even if you were already born in 1971- is that the personal computer had not yet been invented. The computers in existence were mainly mainframes, many of which literally filled rooms. They were huge; there were few of them; they were available to very few outside of certain government or academic and research environments. And their main purpose was to assist researchers and number-crunchers. They were not designed for nor seen as useful for communications purposes.

At that time, the man who is generally recognized as the father of email, Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer for a national defense contractor, took a little program and rewrote it. The result permitted a person to send a text message from his computer to someone at a different computer that was hard-wired to the first one- in other words, it was sent through a mini Local Area Network (LAN) where both computers ran identical operating systems and basic software. Tomlinson needed some way to identify the person sending and his computer and the person receiving and his computer. He looked around his keyboard and found the perfect answer- the "commercial at" sign. And so a new generation of communications was born, and John@computer1 could now send a simple text message to Peter@computer2.

In those early years, very, very few people were online. The main reason for sending any information over the internet was to send it to someone who owned one of the giant mainframes. You had data you needed a computer to crunch for you, and you paid the mainframe owner to run it and send the results back to you. That was about the extent of it. Email as we know it was nonexistent.

And remember- that was only about 35 years ago! But think about all the changes there have been in 35 years.

Back then, music came on vinyl discs, or, if you were high-tech, on 8-track tapes. Every house had a tall antenna sticking above the roof to bring in the signal of the 1 or 2 or 3 TV stations you could get on your television set, which might well have shown only black and white pictures. There was no such thing as ESPN, Fox News, or MTV. And if you lived in a rural area, every time your phone rang because someone called you, it might also have caused 2 or 3 other phones to ring since you had a "party line," and those other people could listen in on your calls!

The world has changed a lot since then because of advances in technology, but one thing hasn't changed. You are still you@yourdomain communicating with me@mydomain. And that is why this report has been written.

It's fairly easy to see why we find ourselves with the present problems and dangers of public email when you see how we've gotten from the first email Ray Tomlinson sent (the text of which was "qwertyuiop"- figure that one out) to the present state of internet communication.

It was only in the mid and late 1980's that anyone thought there might be some commercial use for the internet and for email in particular. And look what has happened since then!

From only a handful of users when the internet was born, it's grown to a community of somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 billion email users alone. It's grown by leaps and bounds, but not the way you might think. Without boring you with technical details, suffice to say that today's public email system has been pieced together like grandma's patchwork quilt.

A programmer at one company would see a need for something that was particular to his work, so he'd write some code and add it to what he'd gotten from someone else. An engineer working at a different company would have a different need, and he might write an email program using a different protocol. Different programmers came up with different solutions to different issues with the result that the online networks that sprang up couldn't even talk to one another for many years. If you were an AOL user, you couldn't communicate with a Prodigy user, and so forth.

Finally, through advances in technology and consolidation of former competitors, everyone could talk to anyone- anywhere, anytime, about anything.

That's when the problems really took off like a rocket!

Why? Because all those years- all through the 70's, 80's, 90's and on into the 21st century- the entire industry push was to make it possible for anyone to talk to you anytime about anything- just as if they could walk up to your door, day or night, and knock on it. In other words, bringing compatibility to the email system was what shrank the world and put everyone on the same "party line."

No one ever PLANNED for email to look or operate the way it does today. It's a lot like taking a GMC chassis, adding a Ford motor, a Kia transmission, seats from a Hyundai, a Honda's suspension, a Chrysler body, and wheels from a Dodge Ram pickup.

If you think that will work well, go ahead and try to drive it. For everyone's protection, however, please do it on a very straight and lonely road because that mishmash would truly be an accident waiting to happen!

There is no doubt that public email has changed the way the world communicates. Unfortunately, all the changes have not been in sync and haven't worked well together. And some unscrupulous folks have taken advantage and have created a downright costly and dangerous environment- for all of us.

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More About Melih Oztalay: SmartFinds Internet Marketing Web: www.5starideas.com EMail: robyn@5starideas.com

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