[hadaso]

I started using email in 1991 (at least my first saved messages are from then. )

I remember when we were kids (around 1979-1981) we used to play with the IBM mainframe in the Weizmann Institute of science, and it was possible to send messages to each other's terminals. It would just write on the recipient's terminal, regardless of what the user did. The first DOS attack directed at me was a simple loop a friend wrote that wrote lines on my terminal screen). We only used it to write each other on the same computer, but as far as I can recall, it could be used to communcate with other computers connected to bitnet, and scientists did use it or email to communicate with colleagues around the world. I remember as a teenager it looked so cool that you can actually communcate with all those computers on the net. The list of computers on the net was almost a whole page. By the end of the year it was already several pages.

I also remeber when they switched from bitnet to the DNS system, and tried to educate people to use the domain name (like university.edu) instead of the old host names on bitnet (there was a long time they had things like computername.bitnet in addition to the dns system that we use now.)

Perhaps the details as I recall them are not so accurate. I just remeber it looked cool how the network got bigger and the whole world gets connected, but personally I didn't use the computer for anything useful between 1981 and 1991.