Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign used e-mail several times a day in the autumn of 1976. The system it was using was a basic mailbox program, a technology already more than a decade old. But for a political campaign this was a revolutionary stroke in communications. On that basis, Carter was labeled the "computer-driven candidate."
By 1979, President Carter was supporting a Postal Service proposal to offer a limited kind of electronic message service to the nation. The hybrid scheme envisioned something more like a telegram service than a state-of-the-art electronic communications system. Messages would be transmitted electronically between post offices overnight, then delivered to recipients' doorsteps the next day. The proposal was remarkable mainly for how cautious it seemed in view of the technological possibilities.
Stefferud and others in the MsgGroup -- the community with the most experience with e-mail -- immediately saw the flaws in the Postal Service's plan, which involved converting messages from digital electronic media to paper and then delivering them by hand as you would ordinary mail. Not only would this approach cost more than e-mail, but it would never be fast enough to compete with e-mail as long as it depended on the Postal Service's traditional foot power for those final steps to the mailbox. Desktop computers "will make the perfect mailbox," Stefferud predicted, and would bypass the post office entirely.
The Postal Service never really broke free of the mind-set guarding its traditional business. Eventually the Justice Department, the Federal Communications Commission and even the Postal Rate Commission opposed any significant government role in e-mail services, preferring to leave them to the free market.
BREAK In the late 1970s, the Information Processing Techniques Office's final report to ARPA management on the completion of the ARPANET research program concluded this way: "The largest single surprise of the ARPANET program has been the incredible popularity and success of network mail. There is little doubt that the techniques of network mail developed in connection with the ARPANET program are going to sweep the country and drastically change the techniques used for intercommunication in the public and private sectors."
One of the MsgGroup's eminent statesmen, Dave Crocker, sometimes probed the Net with a sociologist's curiosity. One day, for example, he sent a note to approximately 130 people around the country at about 5 o'clock in the evening, just to see how fast people would get the message and reply. The response statistics, he reported, were "a little scary." Seven people responded within 90 minutes. Within 24 hours he had received 28 replies. Response times and numbers on that order may seem hardly noteworthy in a culture that has since squared and cubed its expectations about the speed, ease and reach of information technology. But in the 1970s "it was an absolutely astonishing experience," Crocker said, to have gotten so many replies, so quickly, so easily, as that.
But Crocker couldn't foresee what would happen. At the end of the decade there were about 400,000 electronic mailboxes on the network, according to Electronic Mail & Messaging Systems, a reporting service. By 1990, the figure had risen to more than 12 million. Today it exceeds 40 million worldwide. The population of the Internet has been growing about 10 percent a month.
As the automobile, telephone and television all did when they burst into the culture, e-mail and its digitalized cousins -- video, audio, photography -- are fast becoming ingrained in the daily lives of users. In the future, perhaps, society will realize the larger dreams of visionaries like J.C.R. Licklider; he hoped for a more participatory democracy made possible electronically by such a network reaching every citizen. If so, then the past three decades may truly be looked back upon as a revolutionary period -- and the creators of the medium, the MsgGroup members and others, as distant kin to the Framers.
It's a bit difficult to pinpoint when or why -- perhaps it was exhaustion, perhaps there were now too many new players in the MsgGroup -- but by the early 1980s, note by note, the orchestra that had been performing magnificently and that had collectively created e-mail over a decade, began abandoning the score, almost imperceptibly at first. One key player here and another there showed signs of flagging interest in the group; most of the real pioneers soon drifted off and left the discussion behind. After a while, as the group gained more breadth and the discussion more openness, it lost much of its original intensity and focus. Like the sound of traffic on a highway, white noise seemed to gradually overtake the MsgGroup.
No comments:
Post a Comment