This article was heard on the radio program "The Computer Report," which is broadcast live on WCAP in Lowell, Mass., and is syndicated on WBNW in Boston and WPLM in Plymouth, Mass, and is also available as RealAudio at www.thereport.com
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I got a call yesterday from someone who was indignant that I couldn't see the attachment he had put in his email. Thinking of all the recent viruses that were propagated by email attachments, I couldn't help but laugh.
When it comes to email, I use the most primitive of applications -- plain old text-only pine, which was around well before the Web. And every day I am delighted by how fast it allows me to work, by the flexibility it gives me, and the inherent protection it gives me against viruses.
Sometimes the simplest solution is the best solution.
Back in the early 1980s working at Digital Equipment, we all used terminals instead of PCs. And when we first started using PCs, we continued to access email in terminal mode. Our plain-text email resided on servers. That meant that when I traveled from one Digital facility to another, I could easily get to my email account from any terminal in the company, anywhere in the world.
In the 1990s, they switched to Microsoft Exchange for email. That meant that it was easy to send formatted files and non-text attachments -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. That also meant that email files became huge. A one line message might take up a megabyte because someone liked to include a graphic signature line. A PowerPoint presentation with a few hundred lines of text might take up 20 or even 50 megabytes because of all the graphics. And your email files all resided on your PC, not on a server. That meant that you needed a more powerful PC every couple years. That meant that if you were travelling, the only way you could access your email was by carrying your PC with you. And it also meant that you were subject to viruses, like macro viruses, that were carried to your PC by email attachments.
Of course, with the Internet, it was easy to post formatted text and graphics as Web pages and simply send the URL -- a one line plain-text email message -- rather than send massive files over large distribution lists. But very few people outside of engineering did that. So email grew to a monstrous system hog, both on individual PCs and on the network that had to carry all the bloated files. And everybody had to own their own laptop and carry it everywhere, and get a new updated one every couple years.
Meanwhile, at home, for my own personal email, I connected to an Internet service provider and used plain simple pine. All my email messages were plain text and were stored on my ISP's UNIX server. I connected to my email by telnet, from any computer connected to the Internet which wasn't blocked from using telnet by a firewall. If I needed to, I could include attachments in my email and could receive attachments from others. But what I received sat on the server until I had an opportunity to determine who had sent it to me and why. I had to make a conscious choice to download that attachment to my PC.
Today all the latest and greatest email programs are PC-based. Yes, they handle attachments with the greatest of ease, but the messages are huge -- eating up network resources and meaning that individuals need to keep upgrading to more powerful PCs with more and more disk space. And, yes, nasty viruses propagate with the greatest of ease.
Meanwhile, I continue to use pine, and continue to delight in its simplicity and efficiency.
This is email so primitive that you don't use a mouse, and that too is an important advantage. With PC-based email, you keep moving from mouse to keyboard and back again -- an awkward and time-consuming process. With pine, simple keystrokes do everything -- and a minimum of keystrokes: there's no need to hit Enter or Return to make something happen. There are far fewer choices and features, but everything I need to do is extremely easy to do. With a quick glance at my in-box, I can quickly delete spam unread.
Because it's so simple, I can reply to dozens, sometimes as many as 50 messages in an hour. And my plain text messages are readable by any system anywhere in the world -- without having to worry about what email system or software program or what version of what program the recipient may be using. I'll download copies of important files and attachments. But most of my email, I just keep on the server -- what I send as well as what I receive; plus the files that I frequently use to generate standard responses. And my Web files sit in another directory at the same ISP. I can easily add Web pages or edit them, and point to them in my email, rather than sending and resending the same files. So wherever I am, all I need is access to a machine connected to the Internet and I can conduct business.
Now many people turn to free Web-based email accounts for their personal, non-critical messages. They connect with their browser to Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. By doing so they too aren't tied to their PCs. They can read and send email from any system with a Web browser. But they have to wait for screeen after screen to load with its associated graphics and ads, and I can handle far more messages far faster with plain old pine.
I feel like, by staying still, I've leap-frogged past all the folks who upgraded to the latest and greatest. Yes, for email, the simplest is definitely the best solution.
God, what a concept.
Yep, since '94 I've had a Netcom shell account. I don't use it much, and use PPP emulation, but everything you've said in this article is true. It's nice to have the functionality of formated email (I use bold and italics a lot), but for no-brainer ease of use and efficiency the shell-based approach, w/ telnet access, is still unbeatable.
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