Roland S G Jones,
Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, University of Bath, UK

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.102.7

Having just read Roger Thomas’ article on the early advantages and joys of using email (PN 101), I was reminded of my first encounter with it in the late 1980s. At the time, I was working as a Senior Research Fellow in the John Curtin School at ANU in Canberra. In 1988, John Lambert from the University of Aarhus joined me for 6 months sabbatical. John was also an early advocate of email use and was determined that we should use it to communicate when he returned to Denmark.

At that time, it did have the slight drawbacks of sometimes taking a day or two to arrive between sending and receiving (bouncing from node to node around the world), and, as Roger pointed out, required the active role of the recipient to check whether a message was there. This resulted in weekly, long-distance (very long!) phone calls from Aarhus to Canberra with John excited to know if his email messages had arrived or not, and what I thought of their content.