12 Jan
2005
12 Jan
'05
8:54 a.m.
Hell SAGE had multiple sites and modems, electronic
transmission
and storage of human-addressed email is a really obvious idea once
you have a few givens.
AUTODIN - the network before the Arpanet. Made by...
Western Union did automatic,
electrical-plus-electronic unattended
store-and-forward of telegrams (in a few high-traffic areas),
that's pushing "e-mail" pretty hard!
It was pretty damn complex, actually, and ran using modified model 28
Teletypes. The warehouse I cleared out in New Jersey a couple of years ago
had some of the equipment, and the greenkeys people sopped them up. Some
of the things were pretty cool - a 400 cps (!) paper tape punch, model 28s
with a rare HEREIS feature, still others that could defer incoming
messages to paper tape as temporary storage if the printer mechanism was
in use, and so on.
William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org