Errol Morris's new five-part series explores the origins of email. It began at MIT in the 1960s, where a time sharing system allowed people to post files to each other and access them from their own computers. According to Tom Van Vleck, then part of MIT's programming staff:
The idea of time sharing was to make one big computer look like a lot of different little computers that were completely unconnected to each other. But it turned out that what people really liked about time-sharing was the ability to share data.
Kottke rhapsodizes:
It seems completely nutty to me that people using computers together — which is probably 100% of what people use computers for today (email, Twitter, Facebook, IM, etc.) — was an accidental byproduct of a system designed to let a lot of people use the same computer separately. Just goes to show, technology and invention works in unexpected ways sometimes…and just as "nature finds a way" in Jurassic Park, "social finds a way" with technology.
The Dish 