On 2015-09-15, wrote:
I remember E-mail long before the internet was available to the
masses. Services like Compuserve were out there when PCs in the home
were still fairly rare.

We also had Usenet mail, which needed to be manually routed using
"bang paths" to the destination. Users would usually give their
email addresses in relation to a well-known host such as ihnp4
or decwrl, such as:

...ihnp4!invxc!isrnix!zipvax!gomez

So in the above example (based on a piece of scrap paper in my drawer)
if you knew the path to "ihnp4" you could then complete the path to send
email to user gomez on host zipvax.

This was in the days when Usenet was still transported over UUCP rather
than the internet, and dinosaurs roamed the earth.

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Roger Blake (Change "invalid" to "com" for email. Google Groups killfiled.)

NSA sedition and treason -- http://www.DeathToNSAthugs.com
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