Jaan Paljasma | Tech Blog

What will happen to the so-much once-beloved and now so-much-hated e-mail service in near future? Email's future? According to the man who invented email back in 1978 and is original author of EchoMail , it gets better. When I tell people I invented email, the first thing they say is, 'I want to kill you.' Email is here to stay—it's time we got better at using it. Email originated from the interoffice paper mail system (Inbox, Outbox, etc.) used in every office across the world. In the good old days, the secretary did all the hard work and the boss did two things: dictating and editing. But email has made secretaries of us all; we spend up to 38% of our day managing email. The future email systems will have integrated artificial intelligence that will know you as well as the secretary of 1978 once did, and you will be able to dictate to it. It will automatically sort your inbox, file and archive, prioritize, and even come up with reasonable responses, which you simpl...

Did you know that first Web Server in America was installed 22 years ago? That was almost a year after world's first web server was launched at CERN, Switzerland. It contained database of 300 000 research papers. "Today, if you don't have access to the web, you're considered disadvantaged," says physicist Paul Kunz, who on Dec. 12, 1991, installed the first web server in America on an IBM mainframe computer at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Here's how SLAC default home page looked like (it was 1991, nobody knew HTML5 back then): Image credit: SLAC In a way, you could say that Paul Kunz built world's first search engine, for 300,000 high energy physics publications in a database called SLAC. It was pretty complicated to use; first of all you needed to have a mainframe account, and second, because of the language the database engine on mainframe used. Later on they added email interface to it, so people could query by email and g...