An old ad for a company called Honeywell (via BoingBoing). The accompanying copy (it’s hard to read in the scanned version):

Electronic Mail is a term that’s been bandied about data processing circles for years.
Simply put, it means high-speed information transportation. One of the most advanced methods is terminals talking to one another.

Your mailbox is the terminal on your desk. Punch a key and today’s correspondence and messages are displayed instantly.

Need to notify people immediately of a fast-breaking development? Have you messages delivered to their terminal mailboxes electronically, across the hall or around the world.

Electronic Mail is document distribution that’s more timely, accurate and flexible than traditional methods.

There’s no mountain of paperwork.

Administrative personnel are more effective.

Managers have access to more up-to-date information.

Decision-making is easier.

Tomorrow’s automated office will clearly include Electronic Mail. But like the rest of the Office of the Future, it’s available at Honeywell today. (Emphasis Added)

The words “Internet” and “Web” are used almost interchangeably in a lot of contexts. That’s in accurate. The world this ad is about is a world of the Internet before the Web, the world between about 1973 (the development of TCP/IP, the protocols on which the Internet is still based today) and 1990 (the creation of the early versions of what would be the World Wide Web at the CERN laboratory).

Without going into that history too much, that period was one in which computers could connect to and communicate with each other easily enough, but the structure of those connections determined and limited what was possible. I couldn’t get that email sitting in the terminal on my desk from home. The anachronistic language emphasized in the excerpt above is actually pretty appropriate: information was still being moved about from one place to another. It really was a lot like mail.

But that’s not the case anymore. The Web has made possible a very different relationship to information. As it’s inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee put it:

The word Web we normally use as short for World Wide Web. The WWW increases the power we have as users again. The realization was “It isn’t the computers, but the documents which are interesting”. Now you could browse around a sea of documents without having to worry about which computer they were stored on. Simpler, more powerful. Obvious, really.Also, it allowed unexpected re-use. People would put a document on the web for one reason, but it would end up being found by people using it in completely different ways. Two delights drove the Web: one of being told by a stranger your Web page has saved their day, and the other of discovering just the information you need and for which you couldn’t imagine someone having actually had the motivation to provide it. (Decentralized Information Group, emphasis added)

Email no longer goes to a digital mailbox that sits on a desk. It no longer flies down from above on tendrils of light. It sits on a server somewhere. It can be accessed from anywhere. Webmail interfaces changed Email into something quite different from mail, so different that the old descriptions that appeal to physical analogues no longer apply.