Death of hotmail, old travel companion
Today, my email changed forever. Hotmail was replaced with Outlook, and an old friend was replaced by HAL. The first time someone sent me a message from hotmail, I thought it was some sort of porn affiliated program from the name. Wouldn't have believed that it would become part of my identity for countless companies and programs.
I first signed up for hotmail when I was traveling around in India and Nepal in 2000. I had email with compuserve on my computer back in the states that I eventually ditched, but wanted to send notes to folks when I found an internet cafe in Kathmandu. I can still see the little place, two computers, old monitors, and a backup system for when the power went down, as it always does in that part of the world. A garage door came down over the shop at night so nobody would steal the priceless computers.
I sent descriptions of my travels to friends back home. Some printed off the descriptions at work and saved them to read at home. One said a note I sent from Kathmandu was a wake up call and started a new direction in life (seriously, she did). Every couple days on that trip if I was in a town that had a shop with a sign that said HOTMAIL, I'd pop in and send a story of travels back to folks. HOTMAIL was synonymous with internet email, particularly in India as it's inventor was from India.
Over the years I sent hotmail messages from a huge internet cafe with a hundred computers in Amsterdam, lonely little old hotel computers in Peru and Turkey, the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, little booths in India, as well as libraries across the US. I sent an email to my boss at Washington National Cathedral from the library in Sitka, Alaska the day Reagan died, telling him where to find the funeral leaflet information for the state funeral. I've been in contact with folk that I've met around the world via notes on hotmail. I sent notes on hotmail to a woman for a month after finding her on the Onion's personals page. We've been together ten years now.
One night of HOTMAIL will remain with me forever. I was in Leh, a city in the mountains of Kashmir. I seem to remember there being two little kiosks with HOTMAIL signs in town, and I was in one of them. I was sending a description of things I saw to folk back home when the power went out. There was one other foreigner using a computer as well, a German woman who had sorta gone native, wearing a salwar kameez, the common garment for women in northern India. I'd seen her in the streets previously and wondered what she was like. She had seen me as well and wondered the same. We talked for about forty-five minutes or so in near pitch darkness about everything, being there, being home. When the power came on, we sent brief, frantically typed messages back home, went outside and said goodbye and went our separate ways.
Yes, it was just a computer program for sending messages. There are other programs, perhaps with great options for integrating calendar, video, facebook, what have you. I just sent letters and notes, silly me. You can tell a person's age by their email address, and I was one of those old hotmail.com folk (not as pitiful as an aol.com person, but close). It was the most common email program in the world outside of the US and now it is gone. Thanks for the memories, little old blue screened dinosaur.
I first signed up for hotmail when I was traveling around in India and Nepal in 2000. I had email with compuserve on my computer back in the states that I eventually ditched, but wanted to send notes to folks when I found an internet cafe in Kathmandu. I can still see the little place, two computers, old monitors, and a backup system for when the power went down, as it always does in that part of the world. A garage door came down over the shop at night so nobody would steal the priceless computers.
I sent descriptions of my travels to friends back home. Some printed off the descriptions at work and saved them to read at home. One said a note I sent from Kathmandu was a wake up call and started a new direction in life (seriously, she did). Every couple days on that trip if I was in a town that had a shop with a sign that said HOTMAIL, I'd pop in and send a story of travels back to folks. HOTMAIL was synonymous with internet email, particularly in India as it's inventor was from India.
Over the years I sent hotmail messages from a huge internet cafe with a hundred computers in Amsterdam, lonely little old hotel computers in Peru and Turkey, the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, little booths in India, as well as libraries across the US. I sent an email to my boss at Washington National Cathedral from the library in Sitka, Alaska the day Reagan died, telling him where to find the funeral leaflet information for the state funeral. I've been in contact with folk that I've met around the world via notes on hotmail. I sent notes on hotmail to a woman for a month after finding her on the Onion's personals page. We've been together ten years now.
One night of HOTMAIL will remain with me forever. I was in Leh, a city in the mountains of Kashmir. I seem to remember there being two little kiosks with HOTMAIL signs in town, and I was in one of them. I was sending a description of things I saw to folk back home when the power went out. There was one other foreigner using a computer as well, a German woman who had sorta gone native, wearing a salwar kameez, the common garment for women in northern India. I'd seen her in the streets previously and wondered what she was like. She had seen me as well and wondered the same. We talked for about forty-five minutes or so in near pitch darkness about everything, being there, being home. When the power came on, we sent brief, frantically typed messages back home, went outside and said goodbye and went our separate ways.
Yes, it was just a computer program for sending messages. There are other programs, perhaps with great options for integrating calendar, video, facebook, what have you. I just sent letters and notes, silly me. You can tell a person's age by their email address, and I was one of those old hotmail.com folk (not as pitiful as an aol.com person, but close). It was the most common email program in the world outside of the US and now it is gone. Thanks for the memories, little old blue screened dinosaur.
In memoriam HOTMAIL 1996-2013
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