May 16, 2008

E-mail Addresses from the Ancient World

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

Believe it or not, but this was once my e-mail address:

crash!pnet01!dang@nosc.mil

Yep, that’s weird, but that was 1990 — before the Internet. In fact, that’s a USENET address, one that I stuck in my old book Staying With DOS.

NOSC was the name of the Navy Operational Support Center located in San Diego. MIL is its domain. The computer I used was called crash and the service was known as PNet (for People’s Network). My user name was dang.

crash!pnet01!dang@nosc.mil

I didn’t have an account at NOSC, but the computer I used (crash) connected to the USENET via nosc.mil. The way the mail system worked was that mail would go to nosc.mil, which would then forward the e-mail to crash, then to pnet01, then to my account, dang.

The ! is pronounced bang.

Theoretically, any computer on USENET could find my address because nosc.mil was widely known and on (what were then) fat pipes. That was all changed with the Internet, and then simplified greatly with the Domain Naming System (DNS), which is why you can use the Internet today with names like wambooli.com instead of numbers like 216.69.134.36.

Sidebar. The address http://216.69.134.36/ is the same was http://www.wambooli.com. But that name isn’t hard-wired to the address; it may change in the future. Regardless, thanks to the DNS you’ll always be able to find wambooli.com simply by typing the name.

My USENET address was a fairly nerdy thing to put into a computer book on DOS back in 1990. That’s because few people outside the government or major universities used USENET. The PNet system in San Diego was one of the few public USENET access points. Therefore, in Staying With DOS, I had to list three additional e-mail contacts:

  • My CompuServe e-mail address, which I had since 1982. That was when I bought my first computer modem, a 300 bps model from Radio Shack that cost $212. It included a CompuServe sign-up kit.
  • My GEnie e-mail address. Honestly, I don’t remember using GEnie.
  • My MCI Mail ID. MCI Mail was perhaps the most common form of e-mail for professionals outside of CompuServe e-mail.

After the book was published, I began using the Prodigy e-mail service. Books I wrote between 1990 and 1996 (or so) listed that e-mail account as well. And for a brief time, I also used AOL, though I really disliked AOL and used it only at the behest of some PR agency I was working with.

Eventually, of course, the Internet took over and all the various private and proprietary e-mail formats went by the wayside. I have been using dgookin@wambooli.com since 1996 when the Wambooli web page first went on-line.

Question: Do you remember your first e-mail address? Or are you still using it?

5 Comments

  1. Re: your question: Yes, I can. It was only a matter of years ago. It was dcarriso@suttownps.sa.edu.au — now a defunct address. It was an old system that ran on some Dingo Mail platform – eck! It was ugly, slow and painful to use. Then it got upgraded to a Blackboard based system with a dressed-up verson of Squirrel Mail, which was less painful to use, but more prone to crashing and errors and slowness. Eck! Worse than slow broadband it was (i.e. 64k broadband)

    Comment by Douglas — May 16, 2008 @ 3:53 am

  2. My first e-mail address was jamon@yahoo.com. I kid you not. That was in about 1998ish I think. How easy is it to get your first name @ yahoo.com now? Pretty much impossible. I didn’t check it for a couple months and they deleted it, so I lost it….

    Comment by jamh51 — May 16, 2008 @ 1:16 pm

  3. I always want the e-mail account name dang. I could never get it. Sometimes it was assigned to someone else, but often it wasn’t allowed as it was either too short or considered offensive. So I got stuck on dgookin instead.

    Comment by admin — May 16, 2008 @ 1:39 pm

  4. lol…

    Nothing stopping you from creating dang@wambooli.com! 🙂

    Comment by jamh51 — May 17, 2008 @ 2:05 pm

  5. Not now. But when I first created wambooli.com my ISP gave me only one e-mail address to use for that domain. Because my ISP had already given me dgookin as my ISP e-mail account, that had to be my e-mail account at wambooli as well.

    Yes, I know that didn’t need to be the case. But this was 1996 and no one knew any better. By the way “dang@wambooli.com” does not work, so don’t try it! 🙂

    Comment by admin — May 17, 2008 @ 2:12 pm

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