It's not clear from the Sinback oral history just how early email was available on GEIS, and I haven't come across anything yet that suggests it was available on DTSS. But Sinback's account clearly describes GEIS as a broadly available computer information system and he claims it supported email. There is sufficient context in the oral history to infer that email was definitely a feature by the mid-1970s. And Sinback casts some aspersions on Tymshare, suggesting that most of their software was in fact based on GE software. That's outside my scope of inquiry for now, but it is an intriguing question. -- Ian On Sun, Jan 22, 2017 at 3:16 PM, Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:
On 1/22/17 3:09 PM, Ian S. King wrote:
perhaps as early as the late 1960s.
mid-60s. DTSS and GE Timesharing, Datanet, all that stuff is the period you're thinking of.
Tymshare wouldn't have run on SDS-940s if GE would have been willing to sell them hardware.
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-- Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu> Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical Narrative Through a Design Lens Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org> Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org> University of Washington There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."