I overheard a conversation in the office this morning about first email addresses. One guy says he once had an email address without an @. That’s old-school, for sure.
My first personal email address was jmturner at eos dot ncsu dot edu, which I picked up back in 1992. The one I probably used the most at the time though was the Compuserve account of Pioneer Software (a.k.a. Q+E Software). It was something like 71333.xxxx at compuserve dot com. I was managing the company’s technical support forum on Compuserve from 1992 to 1994.
Right now I can’t picture the client I used for Compuserve. I think the client was originally a text-based terminal, though later I recall CS came out with a GUI front-end once Windows became established. This was in the days before the Web became publicly available (though UNC’s ibiblio was already serving web pages as one of the first webservers in the world.
Dang, I’m old.
I got my first email address in fall of 1992. I had a friend, though, that only had a BITNET address so emails to her included bang paths in the user portion of the address.
My first one was my freshman year in college at William & Mary. hwmint at mail.wm.edu. I accessed it using Pegasus Mail on the PC, or pine via logging into the AIX system.