Your very first email address

[cmjones01]

I first got "on line" in the late 1980s using a BBC Micro and a V.23 modem. I found that it was possible to dial in to PADs on JANET, the academic X.25 network, and connect to various services using either addresses in the reversed format (uk.ac....) or extremely cryptic numeric addresses. It was exciting to explore, but I didn't have an email address of my own. If pushed, I might be able to remember my school's Prestel ID!

I did have access to email at my first job at Thorn EMI Electronics on the VAX cluster there, but it was only really used for messing around with. Any attempt to use it for business was considered a bit radical. I don't think it had access to anything outside the company.

My first actual internet email address was at university in 1991, 91cmj@eng.cam.ac.uk. At that stage the academic world was in a sort of limbo between X.25 and TCP/IP so connecting between systems could be a bit odd. I remember connecting from the the engineering department, which was thoroughly TCP/IP based with HP-UX workstations, to Phoenix, the central mainframe as recalled by Tony above, required the use of a 'software PAD'. Email did work externally but there were rumours that we weren't supposed to use it that way!

I later had an address at university in Germany which I had to fight for and justify (zd441121@rpool1.rus.uni-stuttgart.de - why on earth can I remember that?) and, returning to the UK, opened a Demon internet account whose domain name lives on today but as the .com I still use for my personal email.

Chris

[Pamphonica]

My first email address was also on Telecom Gold, in about 1983. I was in Sales in BT so we all had them. I remember making a hash of a somewhat forthright internal email message, chasing a customer order, which I copied inadvertently to the customer it related to. It was not deletable, I was informed, but luckily it caused no offence! The customer appreciated my tenacity.
-Jeremy

[af024]

I think my personal email ventures started Jan 1998 using Outlook. The address was structured like this:-

name1@name2.screaming.net

A user signing up for a screaming address created the name1 and name2, but take note where the '@' symbol is. This is somewhat weird by today's standards and it doesn't half play havoc when trying to sign up to some things as sometimes you might get a rejection along the lines of, 'Please use valid email address'.

This address is still working and I still have it configured in my Outlook, but boy does it get some spam - probably 100-150 per day!

Prior to this, at work, in the very early 90s (probably 1990) I was emailing the outside world using something called 'COS' which I think ran on a central VAX system somewhere in the bowels of the computer room. Then came Lotus Notes (which I quite liked if I'm honest).

Happy days - it beats writing a memo using an Alder typewriter on headed paper and faxing it!

[G6Tanuki]

In the late-80s/early-90s, when the UK academic/research world was coming to terms with its having chosen the losing side [Coloured-books, intending to transition to OSI/ISO protocols in the future] in the Protocol Wars, there was a piece of software developed (from memory Uni of Nottingham were deeply involved) to proxy/gateway email between their Grey-Book/X.400 world and the rapidly emerging victor [TCP/IP, RFC822].

This software managed the 'endian swapping' of mail-server addresses; it was known as 'pp' and ran, typically on a Sun SPARC-1 workstation with 500Mb of hard disk as its mail-handling space.

Despite the protestations of its authors, pp became ubiquitously known as Postman Pat.

I was always amused by how quickly TCP/IP took over from the X.25/Coloured Books/ISO protocols on JANET; in a year it went from the majority of traffic being native Coloured Books over X.25 to the majority being TCP/IP tunneled over X.25.

See Project Shoestring - http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/...gship/p016.htm

[I helped them get their first - 56Kbit/sec - IP-native transatlantic connection into the US]

Fascinating that even as late as 1991 there was a policy statement: "Strongly discouraged services, to comprise services over IP which it was felt were not in the interest of the community as a whole. These were to comprise the following: The use of SMTP to transfer mail, particularly internationally. Here there was considered to be a real danger of fragmenting the excellent level of connectivity enjoyed via the use of Grey Book mail"

If only they knew!

[gw0udmgw]

My first email address in about 1993 was:

james@gw0udm-linux.ampr.org

but if you wanted to get to it from the Internet you had to use:

james%gw0udm-linux.ampr.org@gw6hva.demon.co.uk

I don't know how many people know about the use of the % sign in emails, but it allows you to add an additional wrapper for passing emails through multiple gateways. We were using TCP/IP over an amateur packet radio link but my mate Martin had a Demon dialup account.

Demon in those days used SMTP to deliver email - so when you sent an email to the above address it was routed to his Demon mailbox. When he dialled up from Linux, the SMTP queue would deliver all the mail including any for me to his system - then sendmail would strip off the '@gw6hva.demon.co.uk' and his local rules knew that 'gw0udm-linux.ampr.org' should be routed across the radio based network to my linux box, and they were delivered to my local SMTP server.

Outgoing emails went in the opposite direction and were routed by sendmail and then SMTP over the Demon link.

It felt like magic at the time - I had a 1200 baud radio connection which was free to use, and yet I could send emails from my own computer and have them automatically routed over radio and dialup links, and the replies came straight back without having to have any kind of dialup link of my own.

Obviously things moved on and my first real address came via University but I never forgot the sheer excitement of those early explorations. We had FTP, NNTP and even an early version of HTTP (via httpd) running over the radio, and I also set up a MUD on a Linux box running 1.0.9. Halcyon days!

James

[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

[G6Tanuki]

TCP/IP via packet - yes I did that on 2M using a DRSI PC*PA card in an original dual-floppy 4.77MHz DOS3.3 IBM-PC, a Pye W15FM Westminster [the clack-clack of the antenna changeover relay was a bit tiring] and Phil Karn's KA9Q TCP/IP stack, which was kinda ubiquitous back then.

At one time I was [manually] uploading to various packet forums/BBSes the 'Solar Terrestrial Dispatch' forecasts issued by a guy called Cary Oler from uleth.ca

Download them via BITNET at work, drive home with them on a 5.25 floppy, fire up the PC and let it do its thing while I had my evening meal.

[wireman]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

This software managed the 'endian swapping' of mail-server addresses; it was known as 'pp' and ran, typically on a Sun SPARC-1 workstation with 500Mb of hard disk as its mail-handling space.

I don't remember pp.
You could connect a Sparc Sun 4 to X25 ( a synchronous connection to a JNT PAD) allowing incoming X.29? connections.

But for email I think I used some abomination called Pink Book (x.25 over ethernet) and standard tcp/ip email would have been routed over that.

As for % in emails, yes, we used that to gateway to other networks. You also had a mix with the ! usenet syntax, not sure how that worked.

And we nearly all used

> ...
> ...

to top quote a reply in those days. Even when HTML came along the diehards kept to plain text.

[gw0udmgw]

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

Good work! I do remember there was a lot of hand-wringing in the packet community about 'letting unlicensed people speak on the radio' and some at least felt that if you transmitted an email sent by someone else that this was not permitted. I don't know what the authorities would have made of our arrangement - my mate Martin GW6HVA had an NoV and ran GB7OSP as a BBS which was great fun.

I loved using TCP/IP over the radio, but you needed a few of you into it to get anywhere, so I was lucky. I learned a lot about protocol at a bare metal level. We were using a development of the KA9Q stack by a Dutch guy (Rob Janssen PE1CHL) which was very lean and fast. I had an old 386 which I used as an IP router running it with the Linux box separately. You could also do some clever thing like encapsulate 'traditional' AX.25 packet traffic into IP packets.

By the end I was using an ex-PMR Pye M294 radio with pin diode switching (ie no relay) which was silent and very fast to change over.

As always you only know you're in a golden age when it's over!

[Timbucus]

I have been struggling to remember mine - it would have been the Micronet account I suppose in the late 80's. I only knew a few people on there, I have some old printouts somewhere I will dig around.

Then it would have been on my dialup SMTP/UUCP link to an early ISP (can't remember who) from my home built 386 and Linux 0.9pl8 Slackware brought on disks from my m8 in Cambridge for me.

Then in work around 1993 it would have been on ICL officepower on a DRS6000 X400 gateway for mail exchange - can't remember the details.

[Simondm]

It was probably* Demon late 1992 (I got my copy of Turnpike several years before Demon bought the company), and HP work from 1991. I also tried to get access to Janet in 1990 to explore, but was refused by my Polytechnic as I couldn't produce a good enough reason.

I still have a pair of firmware-upgraded USR Courier 28.8 modems somewhere, just-in-case...

Simon

*I initially thought Compuserve, but better recollection is that it was simply too expensive in the early 1990s.

[cmjones01]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

I was always amused by how quickly TCP/IP took over from the X.25/Coloured Books/ISO protocols on JANET; in a year it went from the majority of traffic being native Coloured Books over X.25 to the majority being TCP/IP tunneled over X.25.

Indeed. When I started university in 1991 our entire college of several hundred people was connected to the rest of the university, and the world, by a single 64kbps X.25 connection managed largely by a big brown PAD box, with serial cables wired to BBC Micro terminals in various locations, on which I would read my email. There was also some kind of gateway from Ethernet and Localtalk on to the X.25 connection so that PCs and Macs could connect, but I can't remember how that worked. It wasn't TCP/IP anyway.

The X.25 connection was due to be superseded by a fibre connection (the infamous 'Cambridge Ring', I think) so was already obsolescent and therefore a bit more available to experiment with. I managed to cadge together a private PAD line to my room using a couple of spare pairs on a handy multicore cable and a 25-way D-type plug I wired myself and plugged in to the PAD (with the computer officer's permission). That was really handy for "working from home". Even then, I found it most useful to tunnel TCP/IP over SLIP through the PAD - a pretty inefficient way of using an X.25 connection, but it was obvious that TCP/IP was the future and everything else was just in the way.

At some point a couple of years later a fibre connection to the college was introduced. Then a TCP/IP stack and X11 server got installed on the (MS-DOS) PCs and there was then a race amongst the students to see who could get a usable X11 connection to a workstation elsewhere in the university. I'm proud to say I won that one, much to the chagrin of the computing cognoscenti because I wasn't studying computer science and they were. Sometimes practical knowledge and experience trumps theory

Chris

[Simondm]

In around 1993, I got caught by HP's IT department tunnelling IPX through tcp/ip between Bristol and Germany (Böblingen), mostly for multi-player PacMan ("it was an experiment!").

It worked, but the latency wasn't brilliant. They saw the traffic (and a comms bill), and the IP of one of my machines on the local network, but couldn’t work out what the packets were.

I 'fessed up, and they put an official ban on IPX tunnelling for about a month. They relented in the end, as we jointly administered a support bulletin board, which needed network access (IPX).

[TonyDuell]

Originally Posted by cmjones01

Indeed. When I started university in 1991 our entire college of several hundred people was connected to the rest of the university, and the world, by a single 64kbps X.25 connection managed largely by a big brown PAD box, with serial cables wired to BBC Micro terminals in various locations, on which I would read my email. There was also some kind of gateway from Ethernet and Localtalk on to the X.25 connection so that PCs and Macs could connect, but I can't remember how that worked. It wasn't TCP/IP anyway.

That sounds like some varient of the Camtec JNT PAD (JNT = Joint Networking Team, I was told, but the similarity to Janet is not a coincidence). This was a Z80-based thing with serial ports using either the Z80-DART or the Z80-SIO. Ports controlled by the latter chip could handle the X25 network of course.

I mananged to save a JNT PAD and manual when Janet was replaced by the TCP/IP network.

I've also got a 'York Box'. This was an X25 interface for machines that didn't otherwise have one. It's a small PDP11 system consisting of 4 dual-height Qbus cards in a BA11-V box. An SBC21 ('Falcon') processor/async ports, 30KW memory, DPV11 synchronous serial port (to handle the X25 link) and DRV11 paralllel interface. It was used with some older VAXen (the paralllel interface could be connected to the standard DMF32 card in such machines), PERQs (using one of the asynchronous ports on the SBC21 as the host connection), etc

[G6Tanuki]

I remember the "York Box" being talked about, thankfully I never had to deal with one! All the JANET-connected hosts I dealt with had proper synchronous interfaces so would support X.25 natively, or they had Ethernet ports [whether thick, thin or RJ45] for TCP/IP.

We did have some very early SUN gear though that didn't have any Ethernet! They had a High Speed Interface (HSI/S) [do not confuse with HSSI, a Cisco standard] with a fat cable connecting to a flat metal box with four D-connectors on it. We used one of these to provide an interface between our X.25 network and BT PSS. PSS was another place I had an account, it was used by Librarians and Lawyers to access commercial databases. PSS was billed by BT on a per-packet basis so the gateway had to have individual accounts set up in order to account for the costs.

There was also a JANET-to-PSS gateway at Rutherford Labs - you accessed it from a JNT-PAD by something rather arcane like

PAD> call 000000000040.PSS(username:password)

or you got a friendly network admin to create an alias for the 12-digit number. PSS also allowed you to interconnect with the US based GEnie network run by General Electric in the 'states - which was useful (but expensive).

My wierdest memory of the JANET world was back in the days when use of single-character-echo mode across WAN links was deprecated (and also deeply frustrating if you were traversing a heavily loaded 9600bps circuit or three: using 'vi' or similar VAX/VMS type editors was impossible!). The answer proposed by the JNT was a thing called a "Fawn Box" which converted an ASCII terminal into something more akin to block-mode working, you could type in a whole screen of text without interacting with the host until you hit the arcane keymapping to send it.

See https://moca.ncl.ac.uk/micros/FawnBox.htm


The idea never caught on.

For some interesting reminiscences on the arcane stuff we had to do 30+ years back in order to get email through various gateways, see here:

https://dotat.at/tmp/JANET-Mail-Gateways.pdf

[ScottishColin]

Here's a web page with the history of the UEA Computing Centre (my mum's in there on one page):

https://ueacomputingcentrearchive.uea.ac.uk/

and in particular here's a page showing their proposal to move to IP

https://ueacomputingcentrearchive.ue...networking.htm

Colin.

[cmjones01]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

My wierdest memory of the JANET world was back in the days when use of single-character-echo mode across WAN links was deprecated (and also deeply frustrating if you were traversing a heavily loaded 9600bps circuit or three: using 'vi' or similar VAX/VMS type editors was impossible!). The answer proposed by the JNT was a thing called a "Fawn Box" which converted an ASCII terminal into something more akin to block-mode working, you could type in a whole screen of text without interacting with the host until you hit the arcane keymapping to send it.

See https://moca.ncl.ac.uk/micros/FawnBox.htm

Thank you for the link. Reading it, now I understand what the 'SSMP' ROM which came in an ex-university BBC Micro was all about! I was familiar with the PHX ROM which behaved nicely with the Phoenix mainframe, and was so pervasive that even the HP-UX systems I used emulated the same terminal settings, but had never used SSMP.

Chris

[Timbucus]

OK a bit more searching on old 5.25 disks and I find a mail from Sep 1993 between myself a friend at mri.ch.cam.ac,uk from bigtim @ infocom.co.uk - for those who know my history I never worked for infocom. I also found a few other odd files one had a story of a dragon Arthir, the bottom contains a footer:

"Philippe Goujard <Sysop> Email : pgoujard @infocom.co.uk
INFOCOM : FREE (yes free!) Usenet access in the UK - (0734) 34 00 55
For more information mail "info@infocom.co.uk" a daemon will autoreply"

So I assume I was using a dialup interactive service there (the mail program was Elm) - that must have been the one I had a UUCP service from as well perhaps, as a terminal session dump I have on the disk has a notice that you should be reading Newsnet offline. I def remember having a bang path route for my mail from my own machine.

Fascinating trip back in history

[ortek_service]

Originally Posted by cmjones01

>>
>?
Thank you for the link. Reading it, now I understand what the 'SSMP' ROM which came in an ex-university BBC Micro was all about! I was familiar with the PHX ROM which behaved nicely with the Phoenix mainframe, and was so pervasive that even the HP-UX systems I used emulated the same terminal settings, but had never used SSMP.

Chris

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.
(I do have a customised Econet ANFS ROM, I found in an old Beeb, I need to do the same with).
They might be useful to anyone wth the h/w to recreate these old networks (or a challenge for the any future Acorn 'LAN-party' events at TNMoC, to complement Econet.

[Paul Stenning]

I started with an internet company called U-Net in Warrington who offered dial-up, so my first email address would have been with them but I can't remember what it was or even what domain they used (maybe u-net.net).

After a while various free dial-up providers appeared (where they make their money from the call costs) so I cancelled U-Net and used those. Back then email was not such an important aspect so changing address as I moved to different providers was not really an issue. I probably had a Hotmail or whatever was about then for a while, and a few websites on Geocities.

In due course I registered domains and started doing things properly. This was around the time we got 1Mb ADSL. My first long-term email address was paul@sp-tech.co.uk which was for a company name (S&P Technology) with my then partner who had mark@sp-tech.co.uk. I stopped renewing that domain a couple of years ago after it had been unused for several years and nobody else has registered it, so those email addresses are dead.