Thank you to Yahoo! Mail for sponsoring this post about staying connected. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.
I started my freshman year of college in the Fall of 1992. My best friend from high school and I shared a dorm room together in T-Hall, which has since been bulldozed. T-Hall was a wonderful place to spend freshman year.
I had my own bed, my own desk, and my own computer on my own side of the room. And I had a long distance calling plan that allowed me to make calls home to California to stay in touch with my family, who were two states away from my University. Every day I dutifully checked my own mail box to see if my mom or any of my high school friends had sent me a letter. It was never often enough.
My roommate’s Dad had sent her to college with a computer equipped with this new thing called email. I thought it was strange that she would get on her computer every night after classes and write a letter to her family. And then it was instantly sent to her family’s home in Oregon through the phone wires.
Amazing!
It was a strange new thing, but I was intrigued and very interested in finding out how I could get such a thing as email.
Believe it or not, it was several years later (not until I got married) that I got my own email account. As much as I had always loved communicating through the written word, email and I got along beautifully.
I started emailing my mom daily, and for the first year or so, I printed out every message we sent back and forth to each other and saved our conversations in a binder.
If I printed out all of my emails now, I would go through reams of paper every day.
It’s funny to see how far email and I have come, from the early days in college when email was such a foreign thing….to today, when email is my preferred method of communication. I use email for everything. From checking with my husband about the weekly schedule to reconnecting with old friends and connecting with new ones. Email is social and it’s business. It’s an integral part of my life now. From the heavy computer in my college dorm room to the iPhone I carry in my pocket…..
I’d be lost without my email.
What is your earliest memory of email?
PS – yes, those are actual pictures of me during my freshman year of college. And, yes, my already-curly hair is permed AND I’m wearing a silk shirt. Ahem.
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I still wrote letters for many years. Especially to boys. I don’t think I EVER had an email boyfriend. Strange to think… ;)
Oh, yes, I had the huge, heavy laptop too. I don’t think mine was email compatible, or else I bet my roommate and I would have totally done the back and forth thing. Kind of like texting, but with a really BIG phone…
I, too, started freshman year with a computer on my desk. It was an old fashioned laptop. Bulky as anything. like, a hardrive with an opening on top. Couldn’t carry it anywhere.
It wasn’t until Junior year that SMU got the Kermit system of email. Remember how DOS it was? I signed up for AOL around the same time. Didn’t we all love collecting the disks that announced “SIGN UP FOR FREE!”
My best memory? emailing my roommate. I’d send her a message, log off, get up from the chair, then she’d sit down and log on to read the message. We could do it for hours.
Oh I love, love, love the pyramid picture!! And yep, I remember when I first got the ez-mail and oh how my life changed…no more finger cramps and well…not sending letters for me!
I didn’t have the internet at home until around 2002. My (then) husband was kind of anti-technology and it just wasn’t a necessary expense. But then my son was diagnosed with Chiari Malformation, and internet research and an email support group helped me tremendously.
Now, I just can’t imagine life without it. I met many friends through email “loops” and met my (new) husband online; the first contact we ever had was an email!
I also started college in 1992, and the first time I emailed was in my sophomore year when I was dating a tech guy I had met over the summer. I immediately thought it was great, but none of my friends had email so I didn’t get to use it a lot. The funny thing was I didn’t hear of the Internet until my senior year of college. To me, email and the Internet were two completely separate things.
Haha! Funny how we don’t know what things we’re going to rely on and use every day when they are brand new. Makes me wonder what new-fangled things right now are going to be tomorrow’s bread and butter.
That’s kind of where I was back when my roommate was emailing her family. I would have loved to have given it a try if I knew anyone with an email address (besides her dad…LOL)
Yes, I would say that the email stalking DID work! I’m so glad it did! :)
My first experience with email was 1994, when I started college. This geeky guy was at a computer terminal in the lounge using “email,” and the rest of us were fascinated. It was solely text based — orange yellow on a black screen. I would have sent one, but I didn’t know anyone with an email address. Thank goodness email evolved quickly!
My first memory of email? I was working as a student at my college to make ends meet-and my boss insisted I get an email account. I protested, resisted and barely even used it.
Also related: They introduced me to the internet-and I thought it was no big deal. Too bad they never told me that my computer didn’t have a graphics card-so all I saw was text. Internet in text form-not so interesting.
I never knew the internet was so vibrant until much later…
I look back and laugh….
If it wasn’t for email, I wouldn’t be married to my husband right now. We met online through a very old dating website and while I wasn’t interested in him at all, he kept emailing and emailing me for weeks until I would talk to him. Obviously his emailing/stalking worked since we’ve been married for 13 years and have 3 kids.