My daughter sent her first e-mail when she was 7 months old. We were on a trip, and her father let her pound out a few letters (mostly “J”) and sent it to her grandmother. I kept a copy of the message for her baby book because, to me, your first e-mail is an event.
When I arrived at Stanford with my suitcase full of grunge-era flannel shirts, I got my ID card and my room key, and set up an “e-mail account.” It was 1995, by no means the dawn of the computer age, but early enough that high school papers were not expected to be typed and my inexperience in the digital world was not terribly unusual. I was advised to choose my address carefully as, I was assured, it would last into eternity. (They were right: 14 years later, to Stanford I am still summerm.) After copious help from technically savvy dormmates, I sat in the computer cluster—my used Mac SE/30, complete with black-and-white screen, didn't “do” e-mail—and wondered why the techies thought this would revolutionize the world. I mean seriously, couldn't they pick up a phone?
With Hootie and the Blowfish (we all make mistakes) playing on my CD Walkman, I wrote to the only person I knew who had an e-mail address and would appreciate receiving my debut message: Dad. Half a dozen jobs and more computers later, neither of us has the message, but we remember that it went something like, “Hi Dad! I'm e-mailing you from school! I hope you get this!”
These days I would use more restraint with the exclamation points. Those first messages were the digital equivalent of screaming into the mouthpiece of an old candlestick phone. We spoke loudly, kept it short and constantly worried whether we had the right person. So many dots and @ symbols, did you need to capitalize the “S”? It was all very complicated.
I suppose all of us have vivid memories of our first quarter on campus. I remember the O.J. Simpson trial on TV as I bounded down the stairs of Donner with a CIV paper on my floppy disk. No laptop addiction, no cell phone, no video conferencing with your grandparents. Just a digital newbie off to print a few things and to check if I had any e-mail messages. When my daughter is old enough to hear stories of Stanford, I'll tell her about how we watched all those tech wonders come to be, and how spam was canned meat. I'm sure she will roll her eyes and wonder how we ever survived such primitive times. That's fine. Her first e-mail is a milestone, and I will treat it as such, even if it does make me so last century.
SUMMER MOORE BATTE is Class of ’99.
