email was Mac something something

[William Donzelli]

> 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 at osfn.org