the mailed letter… yea. but post offices overall are at least equally significant today, as they are the last-mile for a massive chunk of online orders.
Generation X killing the letter industry.
Finally, they get blamed for something!!
did 1983 predict the rise of “catalog shopping”? because I sure didn’t :)
catalog shopping had been popular for decades prior to the 1980s. it’s online shopping that some didn’t predict or believe would ‘take off’, including sears–the king of catalog sales prior to the rise of the internet.
The technology wasn’t the hurdle though. People knew it was perfectly feasible. In fact online shopping pre-dates the web and mainstream adoption of the internet by more than a decade. It was customers feeling safe enough entering bank details online and the whole thing being sufficiently secure. Which isn’t an irrational thing to worry about.
David Allen is the editor of the BBC Computer Literacy Project. He was using a Tandy TRS Model 100 portable computer with a Sendata Series 700 acoustic computer.
Heh.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Electronic mail isn’t new – large companies have linked distant offices with computerised messaging services for some years.
Apart from the fact that it is the only system where you pay to receive “mail” from someone else, it has some intriguing advantages – and disadvantages – in what the jargon would call “asynchronous communication.”
Hook your micro computer up to the telephone with a suitable form of “acoustic coupler” – a device with rubber cups which fit over the earpiece and mouthpiece.
This encourages those who wouldn’t dare to say something direct to your face (and who don’t have anything serious enough to say to commit it to a formal, written memo) to send you “brazen” messages.
It reduces the constant distraction of the telephone – unless something’s urgent and needs a discussion, you send an electronic note and the recipient can read it – or ignore it – at his leisure.
This is relatively cheaper than using the ordinary international telephone lines because the host computers only use fractions of a second to send your message once it has “reached” the nearby exchange, interweaving it with hundreds of others.
The original article contains 1,004 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Yeah it kind of leaves out the article is from 1983.
I think that’s a pretty important detail.
They say that electronic mail tends to be informal in style (as opposed to written mail) and makes people bolder. This encourages those who wouldn’t dare to say something direct to your face (and who don’t have anything serious enough to say to commit it to a formal, written memo) to send you “brazen” messages.
Even back in 1983 the internet made you an asshole haha
Anonymity has always done that