What the heck is electronic mail?
 

http://cellar.org/2007/honeywell_email_ad_1977.jpg

1977

Wow. That seems so...futuristic.

Probably won't catch on, though.

Damn futuristic nonsense...I like my regular mail. Hell, when I was a kid, I had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to the post office...

I thought e-mail stood for electronic mail. Was this a 70's gig that never caught on?

we had that carpet in our den in 1977.

note the ashtray with cig butts on the desk.

Wow. This electronic mail thing sounds really cool. Where do I sign up?:D

:lol2:


...and spam is just a canned meat.

It's ironic that Mr. Laurie Reeves didn't include his email address. Of course none of the potential customers could have used it, but it would still have been a bit of subtle encouragement to "get with the future."

LJ... in that era, it's surprising the cigs were in the ashtray instead of actually being smoked.

--Ghost Mail--

(Having just watched Ghost Rider). I think I'd be viewing that thing with some trepidation if I had to open it.

I looked it up SD; the idea of an email *address* was a little foreign, until RFC 720 (Aug 1976) formalized things like the @ symbol. (Instead of actually writing "at"!)

But that only applied to the ARPANet, which eventually matured to be the general-purpose Intarweb we all know and love. Honeywell would have been pushing its own proprietary email system on its own proprietary network.

ARPANet eventually defined methods for exchanging email with non-ARPANet networks with RFC 754... In April 1979.

Xerox's computer division (Honeywell apparently took them over in the late 1970s_ used to have some great ads. You find a lot of these in old issues of Scientific American. .

I particularly loved the ones for the Sigma series of mainframe computers which actually announced things like specifications and release dates and met them.

I've always been really interested to see what other cultures call the "@". Little monkeys, elephant trunks, snails, mice, cats, ducks, worms, curls and much more.

In Finnish it's "miukumauku" meaning "the meow sign".

little doggie in Russian ...

meow, what in the world does that have to do with cats? is it drinking milk from a saucer? is it leaping all mimbly pimbly from tree to tree? meow, is it eating mice?!

It's a cat with its tail all curled around it...