[History] USPS tried to monopolize email? (c. 1981)

[Erik E. Fair (Time Keeper)]

The U.S. Postal Service's first attempt at E-mail was called "E-COM" (ca.
1984), and it amounted to an electronic submission system for mail that
would then be printed, stuffed into envelopes, and delivered in the usual
way - but done so at the regional centers. It was geared toward 3rd class
mass mailings, and was a dismal failure. While it was cheaper than standard
3rd class mailings, the mailings were output on Printronix dot-matrix line
printers, and they looked terrible. Who knows? If they'd invested in laser
printers instead...

Some of you who were on the UUCP/USENET at the time may remember a small
company on the UUCP network in Rockville, MD called "netword", which would
accept E-mail for E-COM and deliver it for free; the deal was that the
input batches to E-COM had to be of a certain size, and the "netword" folks
rounded out their batches with the stuff from the net.

Eventually, E-COM was sold (I seem to recall the Netword people bidding on
it), and it disappeared shortly thereafter. I know about this story because
Netword was a customer of another company which has also since disappeared:
Dual Systems of Berkeley, California, makers of a Motorola 68000-based,
Version 7 (and later System V) UNIX system on the S-100 (IEEE-696) bus. I
worked for Dual from March '83 to June '85 - my first job out of college.

        Erik Fair       fair at clock.org