this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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For a small period of time I was a god that would bless people with gmail invites lol. That brings me back. I remember compuserve and Hotmail but I don't remember them being especially complicated at all. Maybe that was before my time...? Which would be nice for once
Yeah, email existed long before GMail/Hotmail.
Tell me more about the before times oh wise one
Back in my day, we had to deliver each packet by hand! In the snow, uphill both ways!
Hotmail was already the easy-mode stuff.
Before that you'd get your email account provided by the ISP, and before that you'd have to find someone who ran an email server and ask nicely for them to make you an account.
And regarding ease of use: The reason why e.g. SMTP is human-readable is because in the early days SMTP wasn't the protocol that your email client used to talk to the server. It was the email client.
You'd just
telnetto your server and type in the SMTP commands manually.