To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  I like to think we went through that time together, felt the overwhelming desiring need of each other at the same periods, those terrifying moments of I shall go mad if I don’t have you. The moments of I want to die if I can’t live my life with you, and the dragging dreary days of not thinking coherently at all, but just getting through time, with anxiety permanently gnawing at your innards. I look back at that now, with a ‘did that happen to me?’, but the soreness has not gone quite, I am taking hold of this happiness slowly, savouring every tiny moment, you have come back to me Christopher, you have come back, you mustn’t leave me again, you have my heart, within you it beats, whatever fates there be please do not let us be hurt again, not anymore.

  I know how the writing position is, I guess you feel a bit unbalanced by it all, especially with the ‘coming home’ question being in doubt, I feel a bit haywire and chaotic myself. I keep getting excited twinges in my middle, with my mind trying to keep control of the situation, hence this mixture of anguish and painful uncertain joy. You must, must come home, it would be too cruel, we can’t bear it. I love you, love you, love you, more and more and more, this bad period has shown me its depth in a fashion that joy did not know. I need you pretty bad, my body to live, my mind to be stimulated. My heart to melt at your presence. You, Christopher, you must come home. Having it dangled in front of us like this, it’s impossible, after all that has happened. I knew I should be content with your safety, but your coming home is swamping everything else, and I can read the terrible anxiety that it may not come off in your letter.

  Rockets – well my sweet pet, I honestly haven’t given them a thought for many weeks, the last bad period I remember was last November when Wilfred was on leave, I can’t recall what has been the position since then, they have been falling, but I am very hazy about the quantity. I woke up to rockets when Iris came back from leave about a week ago. She had been to her sister’s in Sheffield and came back feeling a bit scared at having to face up to them again, her agitation made me realise what a coma I’d been in, even rockets had left me cold, I suppose our imaginations can only cope with big fears one at a time. I suppose I shall become rocket conscious again.

  I am now going to concoct a couple of letters, and hope. Of course, I will bear with you, I understand that you have much to do.

  I Love You.

  Bessie*

  Chapter Fifteen

  Inbox

  Computer nerds were formerly known as computer nicks, and on the evening of 29 October 1969 a couple of nicks sat down to make two computers talk to each other for the first time. One computer was on the third floor of a university building in Los Angeles. Foggy grey and the size of a fridge, it was flown in from Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a padded crate and greeted on arrival by nervous and excitable men with champagne glasses in their hands. The other computer was at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) about 350 miles away in Menlo Park near San Francisco, and had been greeted with slightly less fanfare but comparable trepidation.

  The names of the programmers have not become household names, but on that day in California they performed an act every bit as significant as walking on the moon, which had happened a little more than three months before. They built the precursor to the Internet.

  Computers had been connected to each other before, but they were like teenagers at a disco in the way they clung to their own. Because they were not mass-produced, there was no common operating system or protocols. A highly complicated set of instructions was required for each individual machine to function at all, and their function tended to be both highly specialised and strictly limited; in the mid-1960s they were still essentially the same machines they had always been – immense filing cabinets used for maths and storage. There were many computer systems grasping at something big (the FBI had a network, as did American Airlines and a data centre calling itself Cybernet), but sharing their information with another computer at another location was a slow, complex and costly procedure, and it was one-way: a mainframe computer at HQ could be accessed via telephone wires, but the nodes couldn’t send anything back. And as for the mainframe in one company communicating with the mainframe in another – alien software recognising alien hardware – it would have been easier to learn Martian. There was a reason why so many of the early interactive computer pioneers were bald.

  Where email began: the BBN office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  But what would the world look like if its isolated computational powers could be linked with relatively little effort, and if one workload of research could be shared with and measured against another? And how useful would it be if two operators could send this hard-won information thousands of miles without having to print everything out and then put it on a plane? The engineers behind those two computers in different parts of California could have had little notion of what they were about to unleash upon the world.

  What did the two computers say to each other? Not quite what they intended. The plan was that an engineer at UCLA would key in the word LOGIN one letter at a time, and a researcher at SRI would receive the digital transfer of each letter in code. The letters would be going via a phone line especially leased for the occasion. It began well. ‘Did you get the L?’ the UCLA guy asked over the audio part of the phone line. ‘I got 114,’ the SRI guy replied, which was indeed L in computer speak. Then the same with O – it was sent and it was received, correctly, as 117. And then, as G was transmitted from UCLA, the computer at SRI recognised it as the word LOGIN, sent back the G-I-N to be helpful, and the system crashed, because it had been programmed to receive only one letter at a time. Still, that was good going: only two letters completed successfully, but it was enough. The two computers had said L-O. And that was when letter-writing began its slow demise.

  The birth of the Internet can seem like ancient history now. It is certainly old enough to have its history mixed alchemically with myth, and the biggest myth of all is that it was designed to save the United States in the event of nuclear attack. Some of its architecture was built on systems developed at the height of the Cold War, and its funding did receive its first boost from the Pentagon, but its ethical inspiration derived from the counterculture, and on a system of experimentation and information sharing. Traditionally, the late 60s was a time regarded by cultural historians as the end of a dream, but the digital evidence of the period suggests it was the opposite.

  A great many people and institutions were involved in the building of the first computer network, expanding it from those two university computers, but the body responsible for its overall management was ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Department of Defense. By the end of 1970 the Arpanet had established a nationwide network interconnecting many diverse research centres, with a primary purpose of sharing computer time and files; approximately ten nodes were connected. While the original conception of the network was ARPA’s, its operation relied on an architecture designed independently at various institutions, including UCLA, Stanford, IBM and a key private company called Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), which was responsible for the crucial design of the Interface Message Processor (IMP), a sub-network of smaller computers that could link distant mainframes like a daisy-chain.

  A few years earlier, a computer visionary and former BBN employer named J.C.R. Licklider had written an influential paper about the possibilities of a digital world, giving his report a name that still equated it with something out of H.G. Wells: ‘On-Line Man-Computer Communication’.* Towards the end of 1971, a 30-year-old member of the team at BBN named Ray Tomlinson was trying to go one better, working in a room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on what may be called online man-computer-man communication. Tomlinson’s idea was to enable Arpanet users to communicate with each other in a standard and far simpler way than had previously been possible. He devised a simple network protocol consisting of two parts: SNDMSG for outgoing mail and READMAIL to receive it, and his co
lleagues developed other tools we now also take for granted each day: a bit of code that enabled messages to be stacked and listed in order, and a way of sending a reply without having to type out the sender’s address.

  R@y Tomlinson lies back and thinks of his inbox.

  But in 2012 it was Tomlinson who was among the first to be inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, for he had done something more than speed messages through a digital frontier and transform our lives: he also invented a new use for @.

  The ‘at’ sign has been an icon of trade and measurement since at least the sixteenth century (our first documentary evidence, in a letter from the 1530s, finds it used by a Florentine merchant as shorthand for an amount of wine stored in an amphora jar). Tomlinson says he just grabbed it off the keyboard because it wasn’t much used for anything else, and it soon became a universal way of separating personal and local emails from global ones in a mailing address.* The content of the first message he sent successfully is as vague as the precise date: it was one of dozens of attempts. It may have been ‘hello’ or ‘123 testing’ or ‘qwertyuiop’. And the two communicating teletype terminals were not in separate states or offices, they were next to each other, with Tomlinson able to roll his chair between them. And in this humble way a revolution was born (when asked for autographs, Tomlinson signs his name R@y).

  By 1973, some three-quarters of all traffic on the Arpanet was email, by far its most useful application (although it wasn’t called ‘e-mail’, much less ‘email’ for a good while after this: an internal memo about the system still referred to messages or mail).

  Ten years later, the Arpanet consisted of more than 550 connected nodes, and many other networks had sprung up that were using their own protocols for email and file transfer. Some sort of governance and security was clearly required to combine and protect them all, and the Internet (and then the world wide web) was slowly made.

  For more than 15 years email remained an open academic secret, and the world’s postal systems didn’t wake up to its realities for a decade beyond that. The word Internet didn’t enter common usage until the late 1980s, with the New York Times mentioning it only once before 1988. But gradually a new system of communication – something an overheated editor at Wired magazine would one day compare to the invention of fire – improved not just the professional interactions between those who collaborated in the building of the Internet, but potentially, eventually, everyone in the world. In 1995, the number of email messages sent in the United States surpassed the amount of paper mail delivered by the Post Office. In April 2012, the Internet Society estimated that 1.9 billion people use email, and we send 300 billion emails every day (about 2.8 million a second, about 90 per cent of them spam).

  For many of us, checking emails is the first thing we do in the morning and the last thing we do at night, and something we do continually throughout the day; in the old days, this would be like getting up to check the doormat every few minutes to see if the postman had called, over and over and over again. And of course emails follow us wherever we go, a vital supply line and a relentless chore. But 40 years on, emails still want to be more like letters. Their screen iconography is all postal – tiny symbolic envelopes and in-trays – with paperclips to denote attachments and paper planes to denote sent mail. The trash icon is still a wastepaper basket.

  On 11 April 2013, 425 million people received the same email in their inbox. Astonishingly, the message turned out not to be junk. It was from Google to its Gmail users, and it contained details of how to plan for your digital afterlife.

  You know the scenario: you’re dying, hopefully a timely and relatively painless demise rather than something tragic and sudden, and you want to leave something to your family. Perhaps you want them to have a record of all your social engagements (Gmail began in 2004, so that’s a lot of arrangements for lunch with friends and a lot of cinema seat confirmations). Or perhaps you want them to have a record of all the lovely things you’ve been writing to your wife and children when work schedules tore you apart. Or maybe this is the time to reveal that double life you’ve been leading with a completely separate family in a nearby town. So here it is from Google: an option that seemed to cover all the angles.

  Andreas Tuerk, the product manager based at Google’s HQ in Mountain View, California, began in a sensitive way, but still had the air of an ambulance chaser about him: ‘Not many of us like thinking about death – especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind. So today, we’re launching a new feature that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account.’

  Perhaps you had never thought of email as a digital asset before, but Tuerk was offering to take care of more besides – in fact, all your digital details from your photos to your YouTube history. Anything you owned that was digitally still in play could, after your death, or if you were just feeling terribly unwell, be handed over to an assigned trustee. It was like a will, except it was instant, and there were no legal fees. And if you didn’t want to hand anything on, Google would also promise to delete everything you had committed to them – three, six, nine or twelve months after your account became inactive. This would ensure no one would keep sending you emails after your demise, and would free up a speck of space on Google’s servers. The service was called Inactive Account Manager: ‘Not a great name, we know,’ Andreas Tuerk conceded, and certainly an insufficient one to denote the obliteration and denial of an entire online existence. But in some ways, Google was just following tradition. Our history is littered with the ashes of burnt writing, a violent act against ourselves, but a common wish. Why shouldn’t emails disappear as quickly as they arrive? The most convincing reason is, hopefully, spread over the past 400 pages.

  Tuerk’s digital death is only one option in a land of email opportunities these days. There are companies who are paid by other companies to clean their employees’ email boxes, filtering the worthwhile from the junk and shielding the confidential behind firewalls. There are websites that will tell us how to achieve ‘inbox zero’, a holy grail in which one has to not only clear one’s inbox of all emails awaiting a reply, but to empty it afresh at the end of the every day. To do this one must declare ‘email bankruptcy’, an admission that one can no longer pay one’s digital debts. We want to reply to everything that comes in, both out of interest and courtesy, but this has long since become impossible; our screen life is simply overwhelming. So we have to purge, and the results may be psychologically disturbing. A writer from Forbes magazine tried it as a new year’s resolution at the start of 2013 and felt unhappy. ‘As I gazed into a completely empty inbox for the first time [in] five years, a feeling came over me that took a minute to identify. It was loneliness. I felt as if I was in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by nothing but flat, featureless ocean on all sides.’ It was like what W.H. Auden had written in Night Mail in 1936: our heart quickens at the sound of the postman’s knock, for who wants to think themselves forgotten? When the man from Forbes received his first new email after his purge – nothing personal of course, a daily digest from a digital video site – he felt a little less alone. And then he deleted it, and he felt great.

  For those less inundated and less proficient, there are the email-writing guides, the manuals of netiquette. These are not quite as abundant as the letter-writing manuals from centuries past, but they are nonetheless sure of themselves. A Penguin guide from 2005 is primitive but precise: ‘Keep your attachments short; never send an empty message; never attach sound effects.’ When in an email chain or open discussion list, ‘Never post merely to correct someone’s English; don’t post merely to express agreement; don’t ramble; don’t ask technical questions about email or the Internet, or about any aspect of computing; don’t repost your message because ten minutes has elapsed and you haven’t seen it distributed
yet. Wait for a couple of days and then contact the list owner.’

  In 2007, the authors of Send: the How, Why, When and When Not of Email, had a chapter on ‘How to Write (the Perfect) Email’, in which there are useful sections on carefully choosing one’s tone and language to fit the recipient, common misspellings, and advice to keep your punctuation accurate, your emoticons ironic and your exclamation marks unusually generous. ‘Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it where it would normally be.’ So rather than just saying ‘thanks’, which can appear almost sarcastic, ‘thanks!!!!’ is perfectly acceptable. ‘The exclamation point is a lazy but effective way to combat emails essential lack of tone,’ say the authors David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. But they have a cautionary note: ‘Don’t use exclamation points to convey a negative emotion; they make it sound as if you’re having a tantrum!’

  In June 2004, 190 people replied to a survey conducted by the Sussex-based Mass Observation Project on the subject of letters and emails. It seemed like a good time to take stock: email and personal computers were now a regular part of our lives. The respondents reported writing fewer letters, and regarded email as useful but limited: they would not trust their intimate thoughts to email, and they often printed them out, uncertain whether they would still be on their computers in the morning.