Your very first email address

[Phil__G]

Although this thread started from daydreamy musings, its been fascinating, keep em coming!

[Refugee]

I still have an active email address that dates back to dial-up from a charity that was an ISP at the time.
They got taken over by plus net and even though the plus net email addresses stopped after a provider switch the old one has kept going.
I use first name dot initial dot second name and it is usually available on most new providers.

[cmjones01]

Originally Posted by ortek_service

I wonder if there's a copy of those ROM's already on the net, or whether they might be worth uploading somewhere like stardot (or even a copy here), to preserve them as I'd not come across these before.

Here are the ROMs themselves, including a slightly mysterious 'VT100' terminal emulator which was in the same machine. I should read them and see whether they're archived anywhere.

Chris

[ortek_service]

Originally Posted by cmjones01

Here are the ROMs themselves, including a slightly mysterious 'VT100' terminal emulator which was in the same machine. I should read them and see whether they're archived anywhere.

Chris

Thanks for the info / pictures, and co-incidentally I also recalled finding a VT100 Terminal Emulator (EP)ROM in an old Beeb I picked up around 20yrs ago, when many were being sold for only a few £'s.
I guess a Terminal Emulator program would be handy for accessing mainframe computer systems that mostly had basic / enhanced serial terminals
- Which we mainly had (with only a few Sun 2/3 680x0, later some Sun-Sparc RISC, Unix Workstations, that you could also connect to via terminals, as a less-busy alternative to the two mainframes) in the Computing dept at Imperial College, London Uni when I was there back in 1989-1992 (whereas Elec Eng had Elonex clone PC's, but strangely used vi editor on them - at least Computing dept. used microEmacs on their enhanced terminals, so didn't have to endure Unix's usual vi editor).
(Earlier in 1988/89? I had visited my Brother at Salford Uni, and had a go on some terminals in their computing dept, trying to access JANET. But I don't think I really got anywhere past the PICK-OS ? PAD> prompt, not having an account)
Our Amateur-Radio club at Imperial (plus Amateur Radio friends back in 1988) also had Packet-Radio TNC etc, so we could potentially send electronic text messages large distances, via it being relayed across many nodes, but I don't recall sending anything myself.

So Imperial maybe where I also had my first email address, but I don't recall ever using it externally. I do remember accessing various usenet groups (including comp.sys.acorn, and probably have some A3 landscape fanfold-paper printouts from the line-printer), but I never used a browser and http websites / got a (work) email address until the late 1990's when each lab at work was provided with one.

I think I only got round to getting email / Internet access at home, around 2001, with 56kbps max (typ 44kbps) dial-up, on Win98SE using a free Tiscali account set-up CD. So just had to pay 1p/min evening & weekend 0844 number call costs.
I managed to keep that Tiscali email address through later change to ADSL(2) on Plusnet, then Post Office etc. But when Plusnet (who now owned Tiscali) now wanted to charge ex-customers to access this, I got an ISP-independent free Gmail account (that handily would also import from old provider, whilst it was still accessible - It seems they eventually took Plusnet around 2yrs to finally remove all access via all means to legacy email address)

Back to Beeb's, I'd always used Commstar (with an acoustic-couple MODEM) after getting a binary-image file copy of it (for loading into sideways RAM), off my School's Econet around 1985. And used it for a few years to access various BBS's and Prestel (Inc. MUD game) with guest log-ins
- Then someone gave me their company's login details so I managed to log-in with that and send them a message! (even if not true email). Not sure if that was Telecom Gold, (which was famously hacked live on a TV Computer show after they'd showed typing-in of their account details!).

I don't think my School ever accessed remote computer system over the 'phone, only having the Acorn Teletext adaptor for getting Telesoftware.
But I did later regularly connect to local Dudley College of Technology (that had provided much of the software for my School's later Level III Econet) Prestel-like BBS, to download stuff that was free to the public. But download times were often many (ten's of) minutes.

[ortek_service]

Originally Posted by ortek_service

Thanks for the info / pictures, and co-incidentally I also recalled finding a VT100 Terminal Emulator (EP)ROM in an old Beeb I picked up around 20yrs ago, when many were being sold for only a few £'s.
I guess a Terminal Emulator program would be handy for accessing mainframe computer systems that mostly had basic / enhanced serial terminals
>>
>>

Well I've found I had previously read-out the "Tek-4010+& VT100 Emulator 0.10 Susan West Central London Poly 1983 096" 8KB EPROM, I'd found in one of these old Beeb's. And attach it here, to compare with your one / for anyone else wanting to try it.
I had intended to try and put it in an online archive, if not there already - once I've read all the Beeb ROM's I've collected and checked which don't appear to be on an archive.

[Richardgr]

I consider that we were lucky to have been old enough to have meaningful email addresses. Nowadays I would be John.Smith6678934@provider.com.

When my kids were very young I grabbed email addresses for them do that have first_name.last_name@yahoo.com, and I think that was quite shrewd, because of lot of people at that time did not realise we will be 'branded' by that email address for the rest of our lives (probably). A lot of my kids' contempories, faces with 'What will be your email address?' question at age 10, decided on 'twinkle.toes@provider-com' (or similar) and that is not a good look on a job application, IMO, so a missed opportunity.

[arjoll]

My first internet email address was when I was at the University of Otago in 1993 - I was a commerce student but paid $20/mb for access to the computer services centre VAX for things like email and FTP, both in the CSC and via dial-up, so had arjoll@otago.ac.nz. There's no way you'd get an address like that now - all staff and student addresses are on a subdomain.

From there, there was a gap until I joined up with Southnet in 1996 after the partners noticed usage of the work dial-up account after hours and "suggested" I should probably get my own account - that @southnet.co.nz address is still active, mainly as a redirection from the family domain, but a couple of services I haven't gotten around to changing (Trademe is one) still have it as my contact address. After various takeovers it's now registered at 2degrees.

I did have a @clear.net.nz address for a time when Clear Net (since taken over by Vodafone, now One NZ) had unlimited dial-up and Southnet weren't offering that, but I dropped it when Southnet added unlimited options in the late 90s. All email services on their domains (clear.net.nz, ihug.co.nz, es.co.nz, paradise.net.nz and a few others) were dropped a few years ago.

Of course I had Fidonet Netmail through various BBSs from 1990 to 1995, including my own from January 1994 until December 1995 when the realities of life - new house and new wife - meant the cost of running a BBS was a luxury I couldn't afford.

[jamesperrett]

I'm another one who started off on JANET back in late 1980. It turns out that, apart from having to reverse the order of the domain name when the Internet came along, I had one email address that stayed the same for the whole of my working life (jrp@nerc.ac.uk). However, I rarely used that address and so my email changed as my employer changed names.

I've had my own domain since the early 2000s and, as it allows me to use an unlimited number of different email addresses, I can change my address depending on who I'm talking to - although they all end up in the same mailbox.

[emeritus]

My first private email account was with freeserve. At the time, getting an email account from other providers involved paying a monthly subscription, but after reading an article about freeserve in the Daily Telegraph that explained how it was financed, that there was no catch, and you only paid the "per minute" connection charge of the dial-up connection, I promptly got a Freeserve installation CD from my local Dixons, which I must still have somewhere. The consequential long address did once cause a problem when renewing my passport, as the section on the form for your email did not have enough boxes for my original name that preceded the @xxxxxx.freeserve.co.uk, so I just provided a shorter one that would fit. In practice you could put anything you liked in front of the @, as everything ended up in the same in-box.
When we were first given email addresses at Marconi, one of our guys managed to accidentally put the company email system out of order for a day when he went on leave.
He had set up an "Out of office" automatic reply on his work PC combined with forwarding the message to his home PC. He had also set up an automatic acknowledgement on his home PC when going away from home on holiday. The first incoming email sent an acknowledgement to the other PC, which sent an acknowledgement back, which sent an acknowledgement back, and so on until the company's email server's mailbox became filled up with his out of office messages. The company's system was promptly changed to only sending one acknowledgement per day to any given sender's address, which I think is the default these days.

[Nick_B333]

Originally Posted by Phil__G

Thats interesting, for several years I ran a 2 metre packet-radio BBS GB7PHL and a Fido land-line BBS, but was later reprimanded by the authorities as I'd interfaced the two with a homebrew box of tricks that emulated both a TNC & Fido client, with transparent messaging between the two. I still have the reprimand letter from the Office of Telecommunications. For some reason I missed out on TCP/IP via packet, maybe a change of interest. All good clean fun but it seems a very, very long time ago
Cheers
Phil

There used to be a packet node LONNY which was a link from London to NY that probably involved something other than radio as the communications medium. That would be late 1980s or early 1990s.

I was also active on packet radio. I spent time tinkering around with KA9Q NOS which was incredibly unstable on MSDOS but taught me a lot about tcp/ip networking. My first proper email account was with Demon @plains.demon.co.uk which again was a variation of the KA9Q software all running on MS-DOS.

My current email is hosted on my own domain (nowindows.net) which I've had for the last 20 or so years. I learned very quickly that ISPs and free email providers have a tendency to vanish!

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by emeritus

When we were first given email addresses at Marconi, one of our guys managed to accidentally put the company email system out of order for a day when he went on leave.
He had set up an "Out of office" automatic reply on his work PC combined with forwarding the message to his home PC. He had also set up an automatic acknowledgement on his home PC when going away from home on holiday. The first incoming email sent an acknowledgement to the other PC, which sent an acknowledgement back, which sent an acknowledgement back, and so on until the company's email server's mailbox became filled up with his out of office messages. The company's system was promptly changed to only sending one acknowledgement per day to any given sender's address, which I think is the default these days.

We had similar forward-loops happen with some of our clients [it gets even worse when someone's out-of-office/forwarding gets included in an email distribution-list, and even more-worse when half the list-members are on another continent.... and it's a public-holiday like Thanksgiving there...!]

The trick we adopted was to add an X-header in anything that we relayed or forwarded, along the likes of:

X-already-seen: Yes

and modded the relay software to check for this in anything we received, so we could not-forward-again anything we had already-forwarded.

Ah, the joy of being 'postmaster' for a few hundred thousand idiots!

[Michael Haardt]

Funny you mention that. I used to be postmaster for a large ISP as well.

On vacation responses, besides rate limiting the key field is "Auto-Submitted". See https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5230.html for a very readable explanation how to do it properly.

Similar precautions need to be taken for automatic notifications, see https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5436

Those were memorable times.

Michael

[arjoll]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

[it gets even worse when someone's out-of-office/forwarding gets included in an email distribution-list

Not sure if you've seen this, but it explains how bad things can get when distribution lists go wrong... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBmuY6qFMPQ

[G6Tanuki]

RFC5230 appears to have been published a decade and a half after we had to come up rapidly with creative solutions to the problem of forwarding-loops and explosive redistribution to mailing-lists...

The "wild west" days of the Internet - let's say 1989 to 1995 - was entertaining, frustrating, and lucrative in equal amounts! Then AOL arrived and we got "eternal September"!