27 Apr
2024
27 Apr
'24
4:34 p.m.
Fortunately, in the US the net wasn't run by the
Post Office so the
mammals were out of the bag and fruitfully multiplying long before the
rest of the world caught on and started forming committees to create
camel-shaped dinosaurs to perform the same functions. As a result most
of those things were fairly short-term distractions for most of the
internet as, for example, it quickly became evident that nobody was
going to pay postage on email haha.
Funny you should mention that. See I met Doug Humphrey and Alan Frisbee
at a fire sale in 1986 or so when we split up a set of 10 RM02 disk
drives and a pile of Plessy equipment that was from a failed US Postal
service contract in the early 1980's.
Seems the USPS was trial building a system where you could bring a
letter into a Post Office, they would scan it, then send it to another
post office in MINUTES using a big packet switched network based on
PDP11/23's connected to RM02's (yes, with Quuniverters)....
That was the future of "Electronic mail" Post office style. I still have
the docs somewhere....
Missed another bullet we did. Lot of fun stories with that one....