Now let’s say somebody wanted to “speak” to only one other person on the network. He could do it.
Likewise, he might form a subgroup—say, one of people interested in helicopter safety.
E-Mail also is a boon to travelers using portable computers. Peter Nero says that while on the road, he often must reply quickly to proposals for concert appearances. So he taps out letters in midflight on a lap-sized Radio Shack computer, then zips them over hotel phone lines to his office. In Los Angeles a machine prints them for his secretary to mail.
There are other virtues of E-Mail—MCI can even arrange to print letters on your letterhead. A ten-year-old drew his own Bucky Beaver logo for letters to Grandma, and a Chicago bank follows up with laser-printed letters to impress the millionaires its sales reps call on.
E-Mail also can add new wrinkles to old friendships, business and private. Two and one-half decades ago, an elementary-school pal named Geoff Fobes moved to India with his parents, and we started scrawling letters; I even fooled myself into thinking I could learn Hindi from a book he mailed. Not long ago I introduced Geoff—by now in North Carolina—to MCI Mail. “Well,” he typed, “it seemed only karmically fitting to be writing you first. Many glorious surprises when your letter began to appear. My father was dazed and said this was a historic moment. Seems melodramatic, but then he is an old State Department manual typewriter man.”
Electronic mail, of course, also has its negatives. Take Nero. He might have used direct phone hookups to his office computers many times, or perhaps other networks; but as of spring 1984 he was far from a regular on the MCI network. Months after I “mailed” a message to him, I hadn’t gotten an electronic receipt confirming that he had read my “letter.” And I’m still waiting for “God” to reply. As of early 1984, MCI had picked up sixty-five thousand of its subscribers from the Dow Jones News Retrieval Service and the Bibliographic Retrieval Service. And many had not logged on even once. Some registrants—including “God”?—didn’t even know the E-Mail service existed.
So MCI was flooding subscribers’ mailboxes—the paper kind—with brochures telling them of IBM PCs and other goodies awaiting people if they signed on electronically to enter drawings. “God” theoretically might have won “a luxury vacation in Hawaii.”
“Since the programs were announced,” said the Wall Street Journal, “weekly [electronic] volume has risen 20 percent.” MCI in late 1984 boasted 150,000 subscribers.
By now it may have another feature. Pay extra and a computer will ring you up and read you your message. And eventually—maybe even right now—you’ll be able to pay bills and see your bank balance via the network.
Still, fearing loss of privacy, some people won’t use MCI Mail and similar services.