This Video Shows How Painful Was It To Send An Email in 1984

When I turned on this video (shared below), a saw a modem of the size I had never seen before. That was surely not a digital modem, that was a machine with some analog round tuning meters which I used to see in the radio when I was a kid, in the 90s.

The computer in the video looked more like a TV than a computer with some basic black and white screen. It took almost 5 seconds for the guy to turn on the phone internet. Even the guy had to dial up a number for the internet connection which we call dial-up connection these days.

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I almost laughed when the guy in the video explained about the whole procedure as a very simple procedure. However, he dialed up the number and waited for some tone to be received. Once the tone was received as the confirmation, he turned on the modem. And then the computer screen flickered and asked the user for a personal password.

After the password was successfully entered, a very low-resolution screen appeared with a command line interface, where you have to press a key to enter the system.

Not to be astonished, this system with CLI came up with options like news, software reviews, BBC programs, software feedback, other programs like Apple, Pet, Tandy etc., communications and then one of the last options was the electronic mail.

And then the person at the other end typed a message and that message was delivered to the recipient on a printer.

And just to let you know, the computer in the video was cutting edge back then, but that certainly didn’t mean break-neck download speeds, that was just 1,200 bits per second.

Here is the video —

 

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