The Ridiculous Journey Of The First Email From Space 

That the first email didn't consist solely of "Hello, world!" was a massive missed opportunity.

"We've been trying to contact you about your space shuttle's extended warranty"

One of the more “long distance” phone calls I have answered was from the ISS. Back in 2005, I was working at a Canadian Space Agency project in the high arctic as the camp Engineer. One of my tasks was keeping tabs on the equipment in the comms tent. At the time, we also had two Astronauts in camp working on various projects (Jeff Hoffman and Mario Runco). Anyhow, among the stuff we had in the comms tent was IP phones from various locations, including one from JSC. The JSC phone rings, and the caller ID shows an internal number. I pick it up and the caller says “Hey, can I talk to Mario?” He was out and about, but I could probably get him on the radio. I reply “Sure, it will take a while to get him. Can I ask who’s calling and what it’s about?” “This is so-and-so on the ISS, and we’ve got a question about the Desitny window.” To which I replied “Uhh, yeah, I’ll call him on the radio and see what I can do.”

6:57 Just your typical CVS receipt. He purchased a single toothbrush.

Hey Scott, thanks for the shout-out to GEnie and the Science Fiction Roundtable. I had the privilege to start the SFRT and run it for the first 5 years it was around. I arranged the special deal for the Science Fiction Writers of America that got them all free accounts on GEnie. Were you actually a user, or just knew about it? Bill Louden was a fun guy, and offered a lot of support to the SFRT (including letting us run ads in F&SF, Analog, etc.) We were the second most popular non-technical roundtable after the Genealogy one, and we hosted chats with a lot of amazing writers and actors (JMS included, as well as a lot of the folks from ST:TNG). Never knew that GEIS was involved in that e-mail! GEIS and GEnie are pretty much a forgotten part of the pre-internet days, it was a pleasant surprise to hear it nearly 40 years later.

That Floppy disk flying though 😂. Fly safe

Scott, I am an older Computer Nerd from way back. The actual term for that type of “portable” computer was a “Lugable”.

"When you don't have tons of other people clogging the airwaves". Or when you don't have air, only waves.

The password for that Mac on STS-43 was ANYSEES. As for your question, Scott, they started using the Thinkpads over the GriDs during the time of the Shuttle/Mir missions. The last Grid flew in April 1998 on STS-90. The first Thinkpad flew on STS-61 in December 1993 (on Windows 3.11) - so there was a great deal of overlap as most missions had multiple laptops of both types. They were also flying a Pansonic Solbourne portable workstation to be used with DTO-667 PILOT. The beloved Mac Portable flew on STS-41, STS-43 and STS-55. After that they went with a darker grey Macintosh Powerbook on several missions.

Reminds me of stuff we used to do in ham radio. We'd shoot analog TV from a small plane to support Civil Air Patrol and ground-based SAR missions, and since the audio would have been useless anyway, we'd use it for Bell 202 + AX.25 in APRS format so we could send GPS or LORAN-C position data to let the ground station keep track of where we were. Those old AFSK modes are surprisingly robust.

Not just “don’t have tons of other people clogging the WiFi airwaves” but also “direct line of sight with zero obstacles of any kind.”

1:59 that looks like the terminal the marines used in Aliens! Edit: holy crap it was haha!

Glad you mentioned the computers for the "sentry guns" from the "Aliens" movie.

The floppy disk floating away at 2:49 is hilarious 😂

You come up with some of the best obscure and unique things to talk about. Keep them coming.

"The email addresses weren't protected in any way" The most apple thing ever :D

Scott, your next investigation piece: Which was longer? The Space Shuttle printer print outs or CVS Pharmacy receipts.

The BBC iPlayer app is normally only available to IP addresses within the UK, but there is a Houston based IP that was whitelisted so that Tim Peake could watch the Rugby World Cup on the ISS.

2:34 that's an IBM PC Convertible, I used to have one of these when I was a kid. Essentially, a PC/XT in a luggable form factor. 4.77 MHz 8088, 512Kb RAM, dual 3.5" floppy drives. Terrible monochrome non-backlit screen, and optional expansion boxes that clipped on the back, such as a printer, external CGA adapter, etc. Kinda wish I kept it, would be a collectible now!

Here in MExico bak in 1987, I worked at Apple in Mexico, I was in charge on setting up Appleink connection from Mexico to Cupertino. I wrote communication scripts, used old school modems and X25 protocols. Then vía X25 we connected to Pemex network (using phone lines - Pemex is the Mexican Oil Company). Pemex had a connection to TYMNET, that interfaced also to GEIS. Every step required a communication script. So we were sending email's and accessing Apple's knowledge library back in that time!!. I also did tech support and wrote the comm scripts for Chile, Colombia, Argentina and several other LA countries. Great report Scott !!, made me remember these old times!

FYI, we called those "luggable"

I worked for the company that had the computer and scientific equipment maintenance contract for Redstone/Marshall at the time. The grid was chosen specifically for the bubble memory storage (I found it interesting because previously I had worked on some experiments for the shuttle using the same modules). Anyway, there were lots of mail servers around at the time running on Sun workstations that used UUCP to transfer email, but not an organized thing, mainly in the same building or directorate (thicknet and vampire taps are so fun). About the same time I started running my own BBS specifically to be able to easily test the modems that had started proliferating at the time. The kludge to get it to Genie is not surprising.

This is a blast from the past. I was a sysop of the IBM PC Roundtable on GEnie from about 1986 to 1991. I knew Bill Louden and attended a few GEnie conferences in Washington DC. The IBM PC Roundtable provided a good side income in those days, though most of our income was from soft porn downloads from the files section. Didn´t ARPANET email exist by the mid 1980s? I´d have to go back to some old archives to make sure.

So, when was the first SMTP message transmitted from space? 🤔

Even back then siloed messaging services and network effects lock in were problems. Email really is a special and unique system.

Wait, was this really first? I remember the HAM Radio amateurs in Honolulu, Hawaii, had a packet radio connection to MIR. When MIR flew over you would hear the packet radio going kerchunk, kerchunk, kerchunk, as it switched between send and receive. They had it interfaced to e-mail. So it was possible to send and receive e-mails to MIR using their gateway. I was there 1991-1994. I will have to ask them when that gateway was first set up. The local HAMS there talked to the cosmonauts via handi-talkie regularly. MIR usually did not respond to their shortwave receiver because when they were over populated areas too many people would try to talk to them. Hawaii was small enough and isolated enough they didn’t have that problem. They would often chat to people in Hawaii. The local Hawaii HAM community had set up repeaters and packet radio connections across the state. I climbed Mauna Loa and spoke to my father in Texas from the edge of the North Pit of the summit crater, via a repeater on Haleakala to Honolulu and a phone patch. The Hams in Hawaii already had a lot of practice with packet radio. Adding Mir to their network was relatively straightforward.

Amazing Video!! Always impressed how you are able to research all of this and pack it into such a comprehensive video! 👍🙏🇩🇪👽

Thanks for the video Scott - fascinating. I have linked your video on a related comment on LinkedIn as (conventional) aircraft COMMS is still using last century tech and the telecommunications industry, with its modern RF engineering, protocols and systems, is causing havoc in the airline community. Your video highlights the can do attitude and innovation of COMM engineers back in the day - something that is now needed closer to earth's surface. Slainte!

"functionally equivalent to e-mail" is an interesting bit of hedging and raises another question: when was the first 'anatomically modern' (to borrow a term from anthropology) e-mail sent from space? That is, used TCP/IP, went to an SMTP server that sent with DNS/MX records for routing, etc. (Using 'anatomically modern' because email has obviously evolved even if the protocols are the same and most modern mail servers would probably reject those old emails for security reasons these days even if the protocol is technically backwards compatible.)

Scott, Thank you, your posts are always interesting.

Scott, you have a way of making my day more interesting. 👍 Also the game Zaxxon should be brought back.

I worked at a contractor that had a piece of TDRSS. We all pronounced TDRSS 'TURDS'. It was a very large , very expensive government project, and I think there was some obvious pessimism going on about the project at the time (1980)

Hello Scott 13:53 glad to hear the Baud rate mentioned....it was important...once upon a time.. Cordialement,

Ahh, I remember GEnie fondly. I was lucky enough to be communicating via my state university's CDC Cyber network to all the colleges in the system in realtime chat as early as 1982. Those were the days!

We used the joke that the Mac Portable was only useful as a counterweight when carrying an imagewriter.

I remember using FIDONet taking a week to send an email across town during this era lol

The GRiD Compass computer was the devil's own gift to sadists. My development group in Torrance, Ca (MAGIEC) had a set of five. No more than three were on the floor usable at any one time. They broke with surprising ease. And the OS on the machine had more bugs than a mangy dog. That was an incredible vacuum for Apple to step into. (We finally got source to the OS. Fixed enough bugs that we got the prototype network control software for DSCS satellites working well enough to show it's advantages over the prior methods.) {o.o}

That laptop is lightweight in comparison to the Compaq computer I used when I was on call. It weighed 30 Lbs, and looked like a portable sewing machine. It was nicknamed Statans Sewing machine in fact. Good times :)

Around 1983 we had a GEIS account at work. We used it to mail (from Europe) to a US based client we had. It indeed was expensive. Shortly thereafter we got a UUCP connection.

My favorite Shuttle video link was the Shoemaker-Levy 9 NASA broadcast - this included live streams from the Shuttle, NASA Mission Control and JPL, with sections including a live "whiteboard". I watched it at my University in Sweden (via MCAST) back in 1994. It wasn't the first MCAST live stream from the Shuttle but the SL9 broadcast was a BIG deal in the University world (worldwide), there was probably more viewers at peak than all the previous streams combined by at least an order of magnitude! MCAST was/is a really nifty concept too, utilizing multicast distribution to "flood" out the video to (at least) most of the western technical universities -- the Internet still wasn't fast enough to handle lots of streams even at Universities so it was critically important each stream was only ever transmitted once over any given link, and the data got sent down any downstream link that was "subscribing" to that specific stream (MCAST was running on the core Cisco routers). Lets just say there was a LOT of people missing from the early lectures the next day - it was a technical University after all. But I was told even the non-technical University in the same city had lots of people watching it, which mostly hadn't been the case for any of the earlier Shuttle MCAST streams.

That seems so strange to have to go through a modem analog signal with all that data bandwidth through TDRSS.

I would have thought that the first e-mail (non-commercial) might have been part of the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment (SAREX). When I was a teenager i was able to log in to a BBS on the Mir Space Station using ham radio (ax.25 packet). This was pretty mature technology by the late 1980s. But I can't find any reference to a packet system using SAREX.

What do you mean that Mac wasn't portable? It weighed 0 pounds!

This is so weird... all this talk about first e-mails in the mid-90s. We were emailing and messaging at NOSC on arpanet and milnet in the early 80s.

Wow this brings back a lot of memories of my Portable Mac and Applelink

That orange screen is a plasma display.

Thanks for this great snapshot of the early email on NASA. Thanks for all the digging you did to find the details. Let's hope we hear from other people who know other "secret" details.

had to smile at the B5 reference. still love that show

This is such a great story. Thank you Scott.

The standard advertising in space. get your company's product to be visibly used. I think the Apollo cameras used on the moon spawned a great advertising campaign as well.

OMG somebody else still remembers that JMS announced B5 on GENIE!! 😜

A whole video on pre internet (or current day non internet) network services would be cool, but there are probably other channels better targeted for that.

GRiD laptops were both nerd sexy and bleeding edge in their day. I remember practically aching, I wanted one so bad. And then I got invited along for the ride when someone said, let’s stop in at Fremont-on the day the first PowerBooks rolled off the line. I never looked back. (Well, I couldn’t have if I wanted to, as GRiD was mostly commercially defunct as GRiD by then.)

George RR Martin was also on GEnie. He was trying to sell a time travel idea called Doorways. Networks went with Sliders instead. I loved JMS' posts about Babylon 5. Good Disney fan group on there as well. I was lucky enough to be able to connect through work on a high speed 9.6 modem. MS-DOS on a Wang APC.

2:15 He even knows that is was on the Extended version of Aliens only. That's fandom.

Space-nerdy and IT-nerdy at the same time?!? This is pretty awesome/creative engineering to make that convoluted system work. Very cool. Also learned some IT history that I hadn’t known about. Thanks for the video!

I think this may be my new favorite Scott Manley video

I’m frustrated that I’m old enough to remember watching all of this evolve.

Looks like your everyday microservice architecture.

Awesome little tidbits of space history it's fun when you go down these rabbit holes really enjoy these videos.

The Mac Portable was actually something of an "anti-laptop." Even those who could withstand its mass in their laps found that the Mac's CG was well to the rear of the device, encouraging the whole thing to flip right out of your lap. However, there was an incident where a user accidentally ran over their Mac Portable with a Jeep CJ and the unit still booted, only suffering a crack in the case. Perhaps a little too robust...

Thanks so much for creating and sharing this informative and timely video. Great job. Keep it up. 😺

Given that Apple laptop weighed just shy of a metric ton, it would be funny to calculate the cost to send that thing up in the shuttle.

So cool - I love the "hardware meets software meets protocol" hacking solutions approaches such as this.

You might want to dig into the ham radio experiments in the 1980s. Some of our Pittsburgh L5 members were present in a lab at CMU, where I worked and watched a slow scan TV image sent over ham radio from the shuttle as it passed over.

I think it would be really interesting to make a more in depth video about the current ISS internet connection. I've had the question of how it's all connected for a long time and I've never been able to find a good answer

people would plap full typewriters on their laps lmao

Oh, Scott! The Mac portable was a vast improvement over the original luggable, the Osborne One. :)

That old mac "laptop" was more of a "luggable" as I found while working and travelling for Apple.

That's why I've been subbed for longer than I can remember. Epic talk, Scott :)

I remember using a Data General/One (One of the first Laptops that wasn't a lugable) back in 1987 whilst on Work Experience from School taught myself to program in DBase III+ (which got me my first job in IT)

Wow, I'm so amazed you also love Babylon 5 😎🙏🇩🇪 Always wondered how they were able to run such graphics at this time?! 😱

Back in the days this wasn't called a "portable" but a "transportable". 😀

Lugable seems to be the normal term in retro computer circles.

very cool to understand how the tech side of the older tech worked

Now I’m just envisioning a couple of Ubiquiti U6 Pro’s 3M taped to the outside of the space station…. Gotta love POE!!

My parents were furious when I discovered online gaming via 56K dial-up modem playing Command and Conquer with my friend down the street. I didn't receive allowance for the longest time because of the effects on the phone-bill.

Gezus. All those points of failure!!?!?

To think that it would be faster to simply dictate the email to their 'operator'... But as a proof of concept it was fantastic! I also 'digitized modem's audio' once, trying to connect an old ICL OPD (with a built-in 300/1200 modem) to a BBS using a GSM gateway ;-)

The fact that in 1998 they were able to communicate with users (including the president) on internet does not necessarily mean they were on internet as well. Back in those days there were several competing mail networks (GEIS was only one of them, there was UUCP, BITNET and more) and to connect them together there were several sites that could gateway mail from one network to another, usually using the "sendmail" mail server that supported lots of protocols.

Space computer networking is something I find very interesting and poorly documented. I found a document about the first ISS network. It consisted of about 5 ThinkPads running Windows NT with one being the "server" and the other the clients. For communication they used a wireless mesh network based on Proxim RangeLAN.

In 1988 ESnet was running 1.5Mbp/s using T1 by 1994 they were upgraded to T3 and 45Mbp/s, SPRINT fiber in 1996 brought 622Mbp/s. So the shuttles 50Mbp/s was crazy fast for the 80s into mid 90s

I am a Charter Member of AOL since I was an AppleLink-Personal Edition (AL-PE) user with my Apple IIc. I still have my AOL account from 1989.

The story of all the conversions the data stream had to go through reminds me of my college days in the early 2000s. My roommates and I found that it was easier to send files to each other using AIM (sending it out through a series of external servers) than it was to keep shared folders over a LAN working together for more than a few minutes.

The Apple IIC actually had a handle built into it, so while it also was not "portable" in any modern sense of the word, I would still give it credit for being the first "luggable" Apple computer.

3:20 I like how they had to duck tape it down to keep it from flouting away lol

1:25 The early "portable" computers were called "luggables" by the computer press. If you've ever seen an Osbourne-1 (size of a small sewing machine case) or the Kaypro machines (both early 1980s devices) you will know why. That Mac laptop was a lightweight in comparison.

that reminds me of the crazy things we'd do in the early days of the Internet to get circuits across tariff zones (LATAs)

Scott, it’s our generation that brought the internet to the world. Old guys rock

2400 baud - man,... that was livin' the dream.

Wait, a printer can survive take off? Those dot matrix printers really are tanks!

10:37 "have you tried turning it off and on again?'

I knew you were a good dude! Babylon 5 was epic! However the way you say modem is driving me batty.

This is conflating AppleLink, the GEIS-based product, with AppleLink Personal Edition, which was not GEIS-based and is what was renamed AOL. AppleLink did not run on the IIgs, etc. Somewhere I have the mission patches and sweatshirts for "Mac in Space II" that they gave us for working on the software to make this happen.

We always called them "Lug-ables"

The only steps missing would've been if someone had to print the mail, fax it to another office where someone had to read it via telephone to someone else who would write it down and scan it. I also wonder: If the servers expected duplex, what about the software on the "laptop"? Didn't it cry because there was no server response? Looking at FTP and other protocols there was always some kind of handshake and auth before. So did they simulate that too somehow on the shuttle? Or was the software used not the original Apple one?

I can't get a reliable wi-fi signal from my front room to my kitchen - 15m away!

Great graphics, with easter eggs for the oldies!

Nominee for most accurate title of YT post - whew

Lol I love the nostalgia. I remember when this Macintosh stuff was so cool and sleek. we even had a 5MB external drive 😎