Origins: Email at 鶹Ѱ
In the Beginning...
Better than most Buffs, Mike Carter(DistSt’85) recalls when email begancatching fire on campus: In 1987 hebecame 鶹ѰBoulder’s very first “networkmail administrator.”
"Basically, my job was to make surethat email flowed between the variouscentrally managed email servers oncampus and off,” said the man known incampus IT circles as the “ITS historian.”
鶹Ѱcomputer scientists and otherresearchers were using early forms ofelectronic messaging by the late 1970s,Carter said, and they were still the mainusers when he arrived as a computer-savvy freshman in 1981.
By his estimate, fewer than 1,000people on campus were then messagingby computer, and with decidedly primitivesystems: They could leave and retrievetext-only messages on designated computers,but not transmit between them.
The adoption of email as we’d recognizeit today — computer-to-computermessaging — advanced throughout the1980s and exploded as the ’90s dawned.
Sometime in the 1989-1991 period,the student government helped pay forthe first servers dedicated to studentemail, Carter said, helping make it widelyavailable to students.
“The early ’90s was when all this stuffblew up and became an important partof higher education,” he said.
By 1992 鶹ѰBoulder was providingevery student with email as a matter ofcourse. Faculty and staff got accounts alittle sooner. Most people then would haveused the Elm (short for electronic mail)email client and typically had addresses inthe familiar form username@colorado.edu.
In all, there are now about 180,000@colorado.edu addresses, includingthose assigned to alumni.
One of Carter’s earliest addresses,from 1982, could hardly have beensimpler: It was mike@boulder.
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Illustration courtesy Mike Carter