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College emails.
Besides the hotmail and AOL. Anyone
who had email through their college in the mid 90’s was in for a “War and
Peace” type address. You had the some of the simpler ones like:
jjismith@eagle.cc.ukans.edu (Kansas
U)
bellsonlk5e0@numen.elon.edu (Elon
University)
ericksonk@STUDENT.NORTHPARK.EDU (Northpark,
small school in Chicago)
Then you had the schools that didn’t
even bother with names that made it possible to ever somewhat memorize a
person’s address.
c7156447@showme.missouri.edu
069964@XAVIER.XU.EDU
I had three friends that went to
Xavier. I had made friends with two before and got they’re email address,
I rarely ever emailed them. I have terrible handwriting and can barely
differentiate my “4”s from my “9’s let alone transferring what I’ve jotted
down and putting it in an email format. I befriended another guy once on
fall break school who went to Xavier, he asked for my address, he went to
give his and I stopped him, “Dude ( I said ‘dude’ back then) you go to
Xavier, that’s way too many numbers for me to type. You have mine; it’s
pretty damn long too. You can email me and I’ll just hit the reply button
ok?” He agreed. I never got an email from him. It was my sophomore year.
sem44538@jaynet.wcmo.mo.edu I believe
was my sophomore address (they didn’t have college email addresses my
freshman year)
For my junior year, they were able to
compress it to meinkese23@jaynet.wcmo.edu
Senior year-they finally got it down
to the college standard meinkese@wcmo.edu
Have to love progress.
“You have an email address?” That
was a basic equivalent of giving out your cell number
You had to understand this was back
in the day before cell phones were affordable and could get 9 millions
minutes for the price of a snickers. Sprint had the best thing going with
the 10 cent thing. But still it was costing massive amounts of money.
Some people had some Les Miserable
type email addresses.
x017643322@exmail.usma.army.mil (West
Point)
hjmarsha045@tiger.gtc.georgetown.ky.us
(Georgetown, Ky)
I would get carpel-tunnel from
writing these guys. It was terrible writing to the West Point people
though. Especially when the address book wasn’t working. First having to
write down all those characters, and more specifically my emails were
pretty plain and boring consisting of.
Bob,
Sub: hey
Yo. What’s up? In the computer
lab. Thought I’d say hi. I’m bored. Classes suck but I’m passing.
Yourself?
Steve.
There replies pretty much were the
same. It was basically a way to determine if your friends alive (with
response), still in school (if email was no longer available you figured
they dropped out), has a decent grasp of internet technology, and to
basically agree to meet up during the holidays.
But with the West Point emails,
besides University of Kentucky, the second highest amount of high school
friends attending from my first HS, it was like reading a daily journal of
events.
The average emails from friends were
3-5 sentences. Every once in a while I’d get the obligatory 4-5 paragraph
email from those I hadn’t heard from for a year and they were catching up
or were transferring informing me to change my address book that still
didn’t exist. The Average WestPoint emails could have been mistaken for
War and Peace excerpts. If you wrote an email to someone that went there
between the hours of 7-10 pm.
You would probably got a response within 43 seconds...with 18 pages. It
was amazing.
Steve,
Glad to hear from you. I’m sorry for
not responding sooner (it took 53 seconds) but I had a lock up on my F8
key and therefore rendered the computer in limbo for. I’m also sorry this
email is going to be a lot shorter than i usually write, (only 3 pages)
but I’ll be sure....West Point....army-navy game.....plebe.....”15 hundred
hours”....engineering.....PT...etc, etc.
How’s
life.....parties....drinking...fake id’s....etc etc.
I felt bad giving many of the same
responses and felt bad that I couldn’t keep up with they’re email
prowess. They have AIM now.
Most of my email buddies went to
K-state. It was amazingly simple. They never went to the gambit of
difficult email addresses. It was simply initials@ksu.edu. sem@ksu.edu.
The sad thing was that many of these people weren’t my closest friends but
had the highest email commuting convenience.
One of the emails I’ll share. My
buddy Joe Cooper and I had New Years resolutions to get in shape enough to
run a marathon. This is his first day of training.
To: meinkese
Subject: Marathon Training
log
Day 1: 4 games of racket
ball. Took "hot fries" out of diet.
He never ran a marathon to my
knowledge. Neither have I.
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