The yahoo I still use as my primary email address is the one I got in 1995, when I needed a personal account.

Delete 'em. Add a note to your signature that says "I was out of the office, resend anything you still need a reponse to" and delete the whole backlog.

Yeah, I'm deleting most of them -- I had an autoreply set up so that anyone emailing me about book pitches got directed to a coworker. But I do need to get back up to speed on what books are coming out this fall/winter, and reading through publicist emails and industry newsletters is one of the best ways for me to do that. But yeah, almost none of them are going to get a response at this point.

I first went online in 1995 on MindSpring (now merged with Earthlink) back when the servers were in the founder's condo in midtown. When something went wrong, he'd call you.

I remember getting AOL on my first computer (a Mac Performa) and then having to ban a roommate from using it because he racked up so many minutes of long distance phone charges that he couldn't make rent.

Heh. After I moved to Minneapolis in '91, I was low on money and ended up locked out of my WELL account due to being behind on my bill. At least there was a way to avoid long-distance charges.

I think I sent one or two emails to addresses outside of the WELL while I was on it.

I had friends on the WELL, but I could never afford it. Those e-mail addresses to easy to remember, at least.

I ran a BBS in San Diego in 1985 I think, I was online at 300 Baud before that.

Yeah, me too. I was envious of the WELL but I had enough of a time wrangling my three separate Compuserve accounts to maximize my chat/gaming time. I had a separate phone line, so I was pretty happy with myself for being able to take a call while on the internet.

I first got online when I hacked a Vic20 modem to work with my Commodore, but there wasn't much out there at the time, so I didn't get back online until Compuserve, whereupon I was very impressed with my ability to just go look at other peoples' pictures of fractals.

I was pretty sure at that point that the internet was going to be all math geeks, thus "fatou_dust" as my standard, and persistent, handle. I thought everyone on the internet was going to get the reference.

I remember Compuserve! I never used it, but I know some friends in high school had Compuserve email accounts, and they were all long, complicated, random strings of letters and numbers, like en5lxjcb99sl20f@compuserve.com. I don't know why.

Liese, what does "fatou_dust" refer to? I've always wondered!

The first modem I bought for my first PC back in '90 was this completely generic model (even the manual didn't reveal who made it). This was the first time I had to crack open a computer to install something, so it was very exciting.

The modem worked... when cold. After a bit of use it would no longer dial the correct number. So I exchanged it for a good one.

I remember being so nervous because I was no longer just a guy in my room with a computer, but was now using my 'puter for communicating with others. (I guess I was worried about doing something wrong.) Anyway, it seemed that a computer with a modem was a completely different beast than one without.

Nowadays, a computer without internet access seems weird.

In 1984 I was working at a research institute that shared a VAX statistical system with several other research institutes. On the VAX you could send a primitive kind of 48 character IM to other people who were logged on at the same time.

One night I got a message from User243 of another institute: "You the tall psychologist with a red beard?" Yes. "Beer-Francos-9:00, blonde in blue"

We spent most of the evening talking about how, if we ended up together (we did not), there would be a story in the New York Times romance section, because who ever heard of people meeting over a computer. Insane!

Things change.