Errol Morris on the History of E-mail

The New York Times has published a sequence of blog posts by filmmaker Errol Morris telling a story of the invention of e-mail and his brother’s role in its development. The posts – mixing personal history with the history of e-mail and computer time-sharing – consist largely of excerpts from conversations between Morris and individuals who worked on CTSS and Project MAC at MIT in the 1960s with Morris’s brother. The resulting story provides insight into early human-computer interaction and describes how computers, through the advent of e-mail and time-sharing, unexpectedly came to mediate and facilitate interaction and community-formation among people.