October 30, 2015
Dear Everyone:
Pop Quiz! Who remembers a
time Before Email (BE)?
When you wanted to communicate with someone, you wrote a letter,
complete with grammar. Never
learned to read and write?
No problem. Just hire a
professional called a Scribe.
In fact, the condition currently called
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome was first
reported in 16th Century Europe as an Occupational Hazard of
professional scribes. Then
along came technology, introduced by
Johannes Gutenberg in 1440:
The printing
press.
The Scribes went ballistic, burning down printing shops left and right,
as this was a direct threat to their livelihood.
Fast forward a mere four centuries and along came technology
again: The
typewriter.
Now anyone could produce quality printed material without all
that bulky equipment.
But that letter, however it was composed, still had to get from Point A
to Point B and that usually meant someone had to carry it in one way or
another. And it usually took
some time to get there.
If it was really important to get the information to its destination as
quickly as possible, a person could pay extra.
And the Pony Express was born.
It involved small, young men (the lighter the better) who would
ride horses by means of relay stations for what was an impressive amount
of money. The Pony Express
started in April, 1860 and connected
California to the “rest of the
country” (read
East Coast) for about 19 months.
In fact, there was a television series based on the concept,
The Young Riders, which lasted
longer than the original.
Then along came technology, again:
The telegraph system.
Telegraph was much faster, although it involved learning and
transcribing a coding system.
You couldn’t just put your ear to the wires and know what was
being communicated. But you
could pay operators to do it for you.
Just like Scribes.
And the technology lasted for well over a century.
In fact, when I started working at my first full-time job in
1973, we routinely received and filed copies of telegrams.
However, telegrams were notoriously expensive and not a good way to
disseminate communications over a large population.
Say “Hello” to the
mimeograph, which also got its start in the
mid to late 1800s. This was
a way to replicate a paper document multiple times from a master called
a stencil.
Remember those multiple-choice tests we took in school?
There were always four possible answers to choose from.
This was so the answers all lined up on each sheet.
After the students finished circling their best guess as to the
correct answer, the Teaching Assistant lined up all the tests and placed
the Answer Sheet on top of the stack.
Took an awl, or
ice pick, placed it over the correct answer, and
then hammered it through the stack of sheets.
After that, all he had to do was check to see if the hole in the
paper agreed with the student’s circled choice.
Next technological breakthrough:
The telephone. When
businesses started including the telephone, it was typically installed
in the mailroom. Someone
there would receive the call, take a message, and deliver it to the
intended recipient.
Another technological wonder:
The Telecopier.
Someone put the original in a machine at Point A and sent it through
phone lines to a receiver at Point B.
Trouble was, both machines had to be able to communicate
successfully for it to work.
Much muddling through standards until it all worked out to the point
that a telecopy was accepted in court as a “reasonable
facsimile”.
And the Telecopier became the “facsimile machine”, then shortened
to just the “fax”.
Email actually started in the mid to late 1980s.
Originally it was just a way to send brief electronic messages
from one login userid to another in the same computer network.
Oliver North used such a system when he put in writing things he
shouldn’t have during the infamous
Iran-Contra Scandal.
He also believed pressing the “Delete” key meant that he had
gotten rid of certain incriminating evidence.
A few years later, some women working at the same Corporation as I was
sued for discrimination when they found proof that the Company was
paying men in Texas more than women in
California for doing the exact
same work. They told their
lawyers, “Ask to see the emails.
And when they say that the emails were deleted, ask to see the
backups.” The Company
promptly settled out of court.
But email was still an in-house system.
You had to have access to a computer and that typically meant
working for a large corporation, government agency or institute of
higher learning. Having an
email address was a status symbol.
It meant you were important.
Then those corporations, etc., realized that email was a quick and easy
way to disseminate information, replacing hard-copy internal memos.
Up to that point, when something really important—like announcing
a new merger—came up, companies actually paid temporary workers to stand
at all the entrances, handing mimeograph copies to people as they
entered and exited the buildings.
Email was way faster and far less expensive.
And suddenly all employees were required to have an email address,
usually ending in @companyname.
I know someone who got her first email address when she signed up
for a class at the local college.
All students were required to have email and check it for
messages, schedule changes and so on.
In the meantime, companies started wanting to use email to communicate
with other companies. And
entities like AOL and the
cable companies started making it easier for
people to have email addresses that weren’t tied directly to their jobs.
And email systems began to standardize, just like the fax
machines did.
They also got a lot easier to use.
These days everyone and their pet squirrel has at least one email
address to keep track of.
Messages fly from one tiny, handheld device to another.
And, by the way, are all those messages “records”?
You bet your sweet
bippy they are!
Just ask Ollie North.
Love, as always,
Pete
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