fred avolio's musings

Recently, I’ve been blogging about my move from PC to Mac (see PC2Mac. In my next entry, I’ll talk about selecting an e-mail client. E-mail is very important to me. (See what I wrote about this in Disconnect.) So, I started thinking about all the e-mail clients (user-end programs) I used over the years. At the risk of revealing my advanced years, here is the list.

West Hempstead High School, NY
I don’t remember the name of it, but it was the local e-mail system on the DEC-10 timesharing system to which we connected via an acoustical coupler using a Teletype teleprinter. (That’s a papertape reader/writer on the left.) Practically speaking, there was no one to e-mail (except the system manager). There was no Internet. (But, we were happy.) University of Dayton
I don’t recall e-mail. Maybe. We used a Univac Spectra 70/7 timesharing machine. (It is mentioned and pictured in this personal history from my classmate, Ken.)

NSA
/bin/mail on a (pre-TCP/IP) networked 6th Edition Unix system. This is essentially the same mail program on the command lines of Unix systems today.

Digital Equipment Corporation

• VMS MAIL, from the command line.
• ALL-IN-1 e-mail on VMS (an early Outlook- or Entourage-like character-cell e-mail program. (Like Outlook, it ignores standards.)
• Berkeley Mail on Ultrix
• MH, when I grew up.
• Emac mail, for a while
• xmh, when I got a workstation and X11

TIS
xmh Avolio Consulting

• Eudora
• Now, on the Mac… I’ll post something soon.

Holy cow! After I wrote this and I was re-reading it, I took a detailed look at the web page I point to above under University of Dayton. I had discoverd the site simply by Googling for “Univac Spectra 70/7.” So, I did not actually read it in detail. When I did I had a few “Whoa now!” moments. I noticed that my computing environment at the University of Dayton was similar to this guys. I mean even the picture of the CRT terminal. But, then how many of them where there? 1976… interesting. Then — yipes! He mentions one of my UD profs—the guy that taught my first programming class, Ed Krall. And then he mentions another guy I knew, Dr. Mike May. Then I looked at the bottom, the first time the author’s name appeared. Ken Koehler… he and I graduated together, used those same computers, and were in many of the same classes from freshman year on. Haven’t seen or communicated with him since gradutation…until now, when I dropped him a note.