The "Is It Snailmail, email...or whatever? Story

 It was an ordinary day.  Carol and I just purchased a birthday card for our sister-in-law at a local grocery store.  Neat card that we know she will enjoy receiving.  Her birthday is at the end of the week so we thought it best if we sign it, put it in the envelope, put a stamp and return address sticker on it and put it out in the mailbox so our mailman will pick it up by tomorrow.  

What you need to send a memory!

Seems we have been doing that for years and years, when in fact it has been years and years and more years.  It was in 1775 that Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first Postmaster General in the United States.  Wasn't until 1847 though that the first U.S. postage stamp was issued and eight years later you had to prepay for the stamps.  And, who knows how long it might have taken for that piece of mail to get to the addressee on the envelope.  Compare that to today when you can type a letter on your computer or iPhone, affix an address to the letter and in seconds or perhaps nanoseconds, that person will get the mail.  The advent of email makes this entire process go from days or months to seconds.  Email celebrates its 49th birthday this year.  When I first read that I found that unbelievable.  Did you know that email began in 1971?  Email actually predates the internet.  Email traversed the technological revolution virtually unscathed.  A few bits of history about email are: 

#1 - The first email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson who was a programmer working on applications for MIT's Arpanet project (what we today know as the internet). That first message probably was: "Test12".

#2 - The first email marketing blast was sent in 1978 when Gary Thuerk sent a promotional mailing to 400 customers which eventually ended up in $13 in sales.  That first promotional email is also know as the first spam message.

#3 -  In 1989, experts predicted that other types of technology would soon replace the simple email.  Never did!

#4 - Hotmail sparked the explosion of email marketing.  When the internet went live in 1991, email was used primarily by universities and corporations.  The general public saw it as a novelty and too expensive for everyday use.  On the 4th of July, 1996, Hotmail launched the first free-web-based email service.  Instantly opened a direct line of communication to about 20 million American internet users.

#5 -  Then in December of 1996 the "world's largest spam" happened when Xoom sent a marketing email to 6 million internet users to advertise their "Email Robot, which was an anti-spam filtering tool.  Actually, the campaign was meant to be a joke with the junk email telling you to get the free product so you could stop junk emails.  Just in case you might want to know what "Spam" means or stands for, it is a slang name for unsolicited commercial email.

#6 - Five years ago there were 2.6 billion email users worldwide with over half of the emails received being spam.  Hard to believe that that was an improvement over the the year 2008 when spam accounted for over 92% of total email traffic.  

Well, it's the end of my history lesson for today and I need to find a stamp and return address sticker to put on the birthday card so I can put it out tomorrow for the mailman to pick up and pass it along to our sister-in-law. 

Small chart I found to help you understand my story.