The way of the computer [3]

E-mail had my special attention. I participated in a project to supply the RISC OS world with an e-mail client that could manage mailing-lists. The ease with which I could do this illustrates the open and approachable nature of the platform. Creating the same application on current technology machines would cost me a tremendous amount of money and time to complete.

At first I had a CompuServe account and e-mail was stored on the CompuServe computers. Then I got myself a dial-in UUCP account at Hack-tic that later changed it's name into XS4ALL. The UUCP account was used to read mail and news. Mind you, those were the days of gopher, wais, telnet, ftp and usenet. The World Wide Web was still in the making, spam was still canned meat and 19k2 was as fast as it gets. So, mail and news was really everything one needed.

I needed something to be compatible with my computer at work. So, I sold my RISC PC and bought a personal computer running Windows98. From then on, my e-mail address changed almost annually as I was trying to find the cheapest dial-in deal. With the advent of ADSL came also Internet via Cable.

Over the years I've migrated my e-mail from one system to another. My first mailbox was on-line at CompuServe, then I went (rougly) from !TTFN and !Newsbase to Outlook Express followed by Pegasus Mail and Thunderbird and now I'm back to an on-line service: GMail. Go figure.