ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ

In the Beginning...

Better than most Buffs, Mike Carter��(DistSt’85) recalls when email began��catching fire on campus: In 1987 he��became ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder’s very first “network��mail administrator.”��

"Basically, my job was to make sure��that email flowed between the various��centrally managed email servers on��campus and off,” said the man known in��campus IT circles as the “ITS historian.”��

ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ computer scientists and other��researchers were using early forms of��electronic messaging by the late 1970s,��Carter said, and they were still the main��users when he arrived as a computer-savvy freshman in 1981.

By his estimate, fewer than 1,000��people on campus were then messaging��by computer, and with decidedly primitive��systems: They could leave and retrieve��text-only messages on designated computers,��but not transmit between them.��

The adoption of email as we’d recognize��it today — computer-to-computer��messaging — advanced throughout the��1980s and exploded as the ’90s dawned.��

Sometime in the 1989-1991 period,��the student government helped pay for��the first servers dedicated to student��email, Carter said, helping make it widely��available to students.

“The early ’90s was when all this stuff��blew up and became an important part��of higher education,” he said.

By 1992 ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder was providing��every student with email as a matter of��course. Faculty and staff got accounts a��little sooner. Most people then would have��used the Elm (short for electronic mail)��email client and typically had addresses in��the familiar form username@colorado.edu.��

In all, there are now about 180,000��@colorado.edu addresses, including��those assigned to alumni.

One of Carter’s earliest addresses,��from 1982, could hardly have been��simpler: It was mike@boulder.��

Remember yours? Email us:��editor@colorado.edu.

Illustration courtesy Mike Carter