4 thoughts on ““You Are Not Expected to Understand This”: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World”

1. Sounds like fun. So I went to check it out. (I’m curious about what it thinks the “first email” program was, because the functional equivalent of email was up and running just fine at MIT in 1973. (I remember “talking” to a deaf hacker there who said that email was the first time he felt that he was a participating member of a community.)) Also, I was curious how the US Dollar to Japanese Yen conversion for ebooks was going (one US dollar was 110 yen or so for an age, but is now 140 yen or so (after a period at 149)). The US Amazon site wants US$9.99 for it, the Japanese site wants 3218 Yen (which is $22.98 at the current rate.) Ouch!

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2. David:

   From Chapter 4, “The first email,” by Margaret O’Mara:

   A new command should be written to allow a user to send a private message to another user which may be delivered at the receiver’s convenience.” This suggestion appeared in a “programming note” written by managers of MIT’s computer time-sharing system sometime in late 1964 or early 1965, a document so informal that no one bothered to affix the precise date at the top. Neither the authors, nor the young programmers who wrote the MAIL command in response six months later, realized the communication revolution they were helping to start.

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   • Thanks! Kewl! Some twat was claiming to have invented email around 1979, and I was worried it would repeat that claim. Hmm. Maybe it’s worth US$22.95.

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     • yes, this twat
       https://www.inventorofemail.com/

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