An homage to my 21-year-old e-mail account!

It’s a new year, and I should post more, so here’s a random post about stuff from 20+ years ago!

In 1994, after my first year at college, it became clear that I needed an internet connection at home.  I was disconnected.  Sure, I could talk to my new long distance friends on the PHONE, but this was the 90’s!  My terminal addiction rivaled that of my girlfriend’s Candy Crush addiction now (Update: she’s been in successful recovery for months… she’s quilting now).  IgLou – the “Internet Gateway of Louisville” was the only real gig in town, so I signed up.  I was account number 732 - apparently one of their first 1000 customers – something that confused one of the tech support people in 2004 when they told me they’d never seen a three-digit account number before.  Obviously, I’m still rather proud of that, although I think they may have renumbered the accounts since then, and in a recent chat with the IgLou people they’re probably going to do away with my whole account type sometime soon.

The e-mail address that accompanied that account (lynch@iglou.com) was useless at first.  I just needed the account to connect… something on the other end of the line for my modem to talk to.  My university was on BITNET, and while there were some gateways to connect Internet addresses to BITNET ones, I just stuck with 551147@XAVIER.BITNET.  That’s how my classmates knew me and that’s what was important.

I hadn’t had a solid e-mail address before college… I was reasonably active on the Bulletin Board scene, having a Commodore 128, but I made no effort to maintain a profile or personality.  I threw away usernames and passwords the way monkeys throw poo.

Technically I guess that makes my oldest active e-mail account 21 now. My e-mail address is legally old enough to drink! It is roughly as old as Kory, but of course it has changed dramatically less over time.

It’s mostly unused now. I check it for nostalgia every month or so. It’s useful as an SSH client in a pinch, and I think it still grants me dial-up access, though I truly don’t know when I last owned a modem.

Anyway, just a bit of nostalgia there.

Update: Here’s a copy of my old .signature… not the oldest version (which I can’t find), but I loved this format:

      \\ ^ //
       (o o)
---oOO--(_)--OOo--------------------------------------
| Chip Lynch               | Data Geek               |
| chip@chiplynch.com       |                         |
| <www.chiplynch.com>      | (202)904-8570 (cell)    |
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