My First Email Address (A Memory)
This post probably won’t be very long, as I don’t think there’s a whole lot to it. It’s more just a fun little anecdote from my early days of using computers.
Back in 1997, we probably had a couple of different family email addresses. At the time, we usually used whatever free email account came with our dial-up ISP, and we switched ISPs every so often.
Then a friend of mine told me about Juno.
For those of you who don’t know or don’t remember it, Juno was a free email service that had its own dial-up number. It wasn’t full Internet access, at least not when I first started using it. Instead, you’d dial in, it would send and receive your email, and then disconnect.
For the past 20+ years, I’ve pretty much always used either my name or my amateur radio callsign as my email address. Apparently, though, that wasn’t what was on my mind in 1997. Maybe it was because my friend had a more creative email address, so I figured I should too.
Based on what I chose, I’m guessing I created the account sometime around June 1997. The reason I think that is because I based my email address on Dr. Ian Malcolm from The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which had just been released in May of that year and I know we saw it in the theater within a week of release.
The address?
malcolm5@juno.com
Why the 5? I honestly have no idea. Maybe malcolm, malcolm1, malcolm2, malcolm3, and malcolm4 were already taken. Or maybe 13-year-old me just thought it looked cool.
I mostly used that account to email my friend, and I’m pretty sure I signed up for a handful of mailing lists so I could get updates and discussions sent to me. Back then, mailing lists were a great way to keep up with your interests.
I can’t remember exactly when I stopped using that address. I know that after Juno I had Hotmail, Yahoo!, and whatever email accounts came with ISPs like Verizon and Adelphia. Eventually, sometime around 2013 or 2014, I switched to Gmail, and that’s been my primary email ever since.
It’s funny how something as simple as an old email address can bring back memories of a completely different era of the Internet. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that email addresses were something you could just abandon every few years as you switched ISPs or found a new free email service.
Thanks for reading.
— James