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Revolution

It bugs me when people say email is outdated. If email was ever going to be phased out of our lives, it would have happened a hell of a long time ago. RFC 733, RFC 822. RFC 2822. A decade goes by, then another, and still the email standards specification is revised and revised. But no! We have instant messaging protocols and social networking and IRC and crud. So why would anybody want to use stupid old email anymore? Hmm, maybe its decentralized and foolproof (not really) and so horrendously integrated into society, I mean you imagine a big corporate office and the next thing that comes to mind is a big MS Exchange server and little cubicle-dwellers with their MS Outlook all there. Teachers at school use it, big businesses use it, maybe 40 years isn’t enough evidence to see how timeproof the email specification is. It’ll keep being revised and get renamed and stricter formatting but the IMAP/SMTP model made in the 70s is here for another 50 years at the very least. But think, far in the future, a epoch bigger than 64-bit timestamps, when some revolutionary comes to light and rids the world of email once and for all. Or maybe there’ll be a nuclear winter and everything digital we know today will be erased and destroyed. We’ll have to hand make our integrated circuits and work on more precise machinery and rebuild, from the knowledge of professors and enthusiasts, the entire digital, but fragile, infrastructure that we’re so stupidly reliant on. Then, there’ll be a ingenious new digital-network text/multimedia messaging protocol made by some geniuses that survive in the future. Ironic that the historic Email Revolution will be the second greatest event in human history of its time.

1 CommentAdd one

iamnotjamesh
Sat, 09 Oct 2010 00:38:56 GMT

I wonder who still uses IRC

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Fri, 29 Mar 2024 12:08:59 GMT