anyone ever use MCI Mail?

[ccl1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCI_Mail

launched in1983 it says was the first commercial email service. Shut down in 2003. I just learned about it today. I also found this old blog about it, with some commercials and other misc things http://mcimail.blogspot.com/2009/08/...rtisments.html

[jeffpan]

1983... most guys playing on internet today didn't get born at that time.

[Bamb0]

Wow 1983??

I dont think many got online until the 90s right??

[Tsunami]

Originally Posted by Bamb0

Wow 1983??

I dont think many got online until the 90s right??

Not even until the late nineties are early 2000s. I was in secondary school in the nineties, and there weren't many fellow students of whom I knew they had internet in the house. The public computer in the library was my main access to the web in the late nineties, my first home connection must have been in 1999 or 2000 if I recall well.

I'm surprised there was a commercial email service in 1983 How many people accessed the internet back then?

[n5bb]

Originally Posted by ccl1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCI_Mail
launched in 1983 it says was the first commercial email service..

Yes, I played around with MCI Mail and Western Union EasyLink (which started in 1982). See:
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/31/b...k-feature.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wester...ter_networking

Email during the 1980's and earlier was sent via either storage systems or store and forward systems. Western Union had an electromechanical paper tape storage system in the 1960's and 1970's, and the TELEX system also allowed for sending text. In the 1980's several private data networks were created, and they eventually moved to the .X25 packet protocol.

From about 1980-1982, a company I worked for hosted the physical location for the GTE Telenet packet switch node in Austin, Texas. The upstream larger node was in Dallas, Texas. In the Austin node we had a bank of telephone line modems which customers could dial into. Data was compressed and sent through that private network to a host computer. This was over a decade before the internet became widespread in the early to mid 1990's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet

So early email providers used telephone connections (which could be long distance - very expensive back then) with modems into their private data networks before the internet was deployed.

Bill