#TBT: Email In 1984
Watching this hilarious throwback video will make you appreciate the email system we know and love today.
1984 may be a year that conjures dystopian images of an Orwellian Big Brother society, but here at UK2 1984 marks a period of the early internet, an era of scary hair-dos, and also some of the very first email correspondence. Consider your email inbox now: can you imagine ever having to physically connect to a landline phone connection just to transmit a message? Perhaps you wish some of your more spammy, annoying email contacts had to go through this to contact you, but it seems positively prehistoric to imagine anything but instant email in today’s society.
Our day-to-day experiences of instant contact – be it via email, social media or text messaging – makes the video we stumbled across this week all the more amusing and frankly unbelievable. First shown on the Thames TV show Database, the extract sees host Jane Ashton discussing the wonders of dial-up with techies Pat and Julien, expressing firstly her disbelief about a computer being linked up to a telephone line via a modem, and latterly prompting an explanation of how “simple” the connection and subsequent email comms are. Take a look below if you fancy a giggle:
For many of us it’s easy to forget that the internet and email communications are such a new thing at just 30 years young. Considering that fact we now expect and demand instant data transfer from our internet providers, for many of us the buzzing of a dial-up modem has been pushed out of our minds, although I’d bet you never really forgot that noise! You’re unlikely to forget the fashion choices in the above video, either.
Happy #ThrowBackThursday!