Remember when email was useful? I remember when it was magical!

Time for a story from the ancient times. I had this idea and asked my professor for advice. He said he knew a person on the other side of the world who would know all about it. “This is his ‘email’ address.”

I had never heard about ‘email’ so I needed to learn what it was and how to send one. I wrote my message and off it went. The very next morning I had a reply. One of the best experts on a topic I was keen about had shared their thoughts from the other side of the world, just like that.

In that time, a long time ago as you’ll appreciate, that interaction was magical.

In an instant I understood the power of the Usenet. A while later and with a couple of additional protocols they started calling that the Internet.

and sending or receiving them required no training.

If you mean paying someone to send them, then sure. But it required learning Morse code, and learning to use a keyer.

You couldn’t send them overseas until after the invention of radio. Before that the signal traveled along a wire they laid the transatlantic cable.