Carl Tyler wrote about him realizing it was 21 years ago he got his first email address:
The day after my 40th birthday, I realized it had been exactly 21 years since I got my first email account. It was if I remember rightly Tylerc2@NossVM6. This was my IBM PROFS address and I was given it the day I started there.
That made me think back at my first email address.I got it when I started working at Microsoft, in late August 1988, so just over 21 years ago for me as well.
I was fresh out of thegymnasium (the Swedish equialent of theCollege Preperatory High School in the United States), and the Systems Programming education I had just started was cancelled and postponed for a semester due to lack of students. So I applied for a job at Microsoft, despite never using any MS products. I was using CP/M-86,WordStar and and Turbo Pascal 3.x in school.
During my first week they gave me the address karlhenr@microsoft.com. Notice the missing y in my name, they could not handle my long/full first name. The limit back then was 8 characters.
We had to login to a Xenix-based system to read our email… I also had a FidoNet address, but I did not get that one until a year later.