Re: deterioration of email (was Re: clever usc creation)

Jack Haverty via Internet-history <[email protected]> Fri, 7 Aug 2026 12:48:35 -0700
Newsgroups	gmane.culture.internet.history
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Interesting discussion, but focussing back on history....

In the 1970s, ARPA created a program called CAHCOM - Computer Assisted 
Human COMmunications - to explore how to use computers talking amongst 
themselves over some kind of network to assist humans in their own 
communications among humans.   This was one of the major elements of 
Licklider's vision of zillions of interacting computers helping people 
do everything people do.

Over the next decade or so, a lot of different mechanisms, protocols, 
and research created what seem to me to be the precursors of many 
mechanisms for human interaction used in today's Internet.

In the 1970s/80s, the vision was that each such mechanism would be 
captured in some kind of standard protocol and algorithms, and that they 
would somehow be integrated.  For example, a "conversation" might start 
out as a telephone call, migrate to an online discussion, and evolve 
into a real-time interactive videoconference.    All of those 
interactions might be saved and accessible to humans brought into the 
conversation later, as well as to History.   The Datacomputer, with its 
massive terabit (!!) of online memory, would store it all.

I'd argue that much of today's human interactions are descendants of the 
early research - USENET and NNTP preceded social media.  MBone preceded 
all of today's teleconferencing systems.  Email preceded today's walled 
gardens of messaging, as well as "texting" with SMS, RCS, et al.   IRC 
preceded today's various mechanisms for online chatting and texting.

Many of these systems and technologies are still used by some parts of 
the Internet community.  But none of them have established a standard 
for their form of CAHCOM.  Worse yet, few if any of today's copycat 
systems interoperate.   We're all forced to use multiple disjoint 
mailboxes, chat rooms, forums, teleconferences, voicemails, and devices 
to communicate with other humans.   Sometimes it seems our 
interconnected computers are making it harder to communicate rather than 
easier.

It seems to me that only TCP, or perhaps only IP and UDP, has emerged as 
a standard for communications between computers, with no standards for 
computers to assist communications among humans.  Earlier communications 
mechanisms, such as postal mail and telephony, evolved into worldwide 
services.   Even banking and finance work globally.  But not CAHCOM; at 
least not yet.

Why did that happen?

Perhaps it was just inevitable, as research results migrate into the 
real world of economics and competition?

Perhaps it's simply not done yet, taking longer than we should expect?

Perhaps the researchers simply forgot or neglected to do something (such 
as make the tech simple to deploy and use)?

Perhaps governments didn't do enough to establish laws, treaties, 
regulations, and such mechanisms to guide the evolution?

Perhaps Metcalfe's Law is wrong, and networks are actually more valuable 
when they are walled gardens of captive communities?

Perhaps...?

/Jack Haverty

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