What I Use: Email forever

My first experience with email came in college. When I got that piece of paper with the randomly assigned user name and password to my first Unix account as a freshman at UC San Diego, I didn’t realize that I was starting a lifelong (well, at least so far!) relationship with the world of text sent to username@something.something. But I was.

We used it for all sorts of things. I sent emails to the few friends of mine from high school who had also gotten accounts—there were about four of us. I have fond memories of sitting in a computer lab, composing my first few messages to friends in San Francisco and Seattle.

Back then, email was the only near-real-time communication medium available to most college students. By today’s standards, it was ridiculously primitive: You had to send the message and then wait, hoping that the person on the other end would reply.…