1/13/2024 0 Comments Kgb archiver worksReally take off The main uses will be for businesses to send material to each other, or to their customers, or as employees “log-in” at home to do work there. But it could threaten traditional postal services by undermining their main source of income: 75 per cent of mail is business mail. It is not suggested that electronic mail will usurp the telephone in the way the telephone took over from the telegraph. Although British Telecom Gold say that their subscribers are increasing by 15 per cent a month, the number of people we want to contact is limited. Of course, there have to be plenty of people on the system to make it worthwhile – and that is the problem at present. This is relatively cheaper than using the ordinary international telephone lines because the host computers only use fractions of a second to send your message once it has “reached” the nearby exchange, interweaving it with hundreds of others. The office is only a local telephone call away, thanks to the International Packet Switching System. But you can work all hours because you can get into the system from home.Įven if you are abroad, work can follow you wherever you are – there’s no excuse. It reduces the constant distraction of the telephone – unless something’s urgent and needs a discussion, you send an electronic note and the recipient can read it – or ignore it – at his leisure. This encourages those who wouldn’t dare to say something direct to your face (and who don’t have anything serious enough to say to commit it to a formal, written memo) to send you “brazen” messages. They say that electronic mail tends to be informal in style (as opposed to written mail) and makes people bolder. One American company, operating a mature system, have some interesting views. And you can, of course, print mail out on a printer later if you want it to be permanent. Once in, you can find out if people have left mail messages for you, send messages yourself, file things away (again, on the central computer), and even discover whether messages you have sent have been read by those you’ve sent them to.Īlthough it’s easy to play on the system and use it for rather trivial purposes, electronic mail really comes into its own with long distance communication when letters would take some time to arrive, when you and your contact are frequently out of the office, when you’re on the road and need to get information at awkward times, or when you want long, detailed material to arrive at once. If you’ve got an account and know the incantations and passwords (computing is a bit like a magic circle at present), you can then “enter” your mailbox. Communication is by rapidly changing tones received and transmitted via the coupler. Your machine can now act as a “terminal” to a large computer somewhere in the BT web. Run the appropriate piece of software to turn your computer into a “dumb terminal” and dial a local telephone number. Hook your micro computer up to the telephone with a suitable form of “acoustic coupler” – a device with rubber cups which fit over the earpiece and mouthpiece. Apart from the fact that it is the only system where you pay to receive “mail” from someone else, it has some intriguing advantages – and disadvantages – in what the jargon would call “asynchronous communication.” Informal in style But is electronic mail more than an electronic solution in search of a problem.
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