The Ridiculous Journey Of The First Email From Space

"We've been trying to contact you about your space shuttle's extended warranty"

That the first email didn't consist solely of "Hello, world!" was a massive missed opportunity.

6:57 Just your typical CVS receipt. He purchased a single toothbrush.

One of the more “long distance” phone calls I have answered was from the ISS. Back in 2005, I was working at a Canadian Space Agency project in the high arctic as the camp Engineer. One of my tasks was keeping tabs on the equipment in the comms tent. At the time, we also had two Astronauts in camp working on various projects (Jeff Hoffman and Mario Runco). Anyhow, among the stuff we had in the comms tent was IP phones from various locations, including one from JSC. The JSC phone rings, and the caller ID shows an internal number. I pick it up and the caller says “Hey, can I talk to Mario?” He was out and about, but I could probably get him on the radio. I reply “Sure, it will take a while to get him. Can I ask who’s calling and what it’s about?” “This is so-and-so on the ISS, and we’ve got a question about the Desitny window.” To which I replied “Uhh, yeah, I’ll call him on the radio and see what I can do.”

Scott, I am an older Computer Nerd from way back. The actual term for that type of “portable” computer was a “Lugable”.

Hey Scott, thanks for the shout-out to GEnie and the Science Fiction Roundtable. I had the privilege to start the SFRT and run it for the first 5 years it was around. I arranged the special deal for the Science Fiction Writers of America that got them all free accounts on GEnie. Were you actually a user, or just knew about it? Bill Louden was a fun guy, and offered a lot of support to the SFRT (including letting us run ads in F&SF, Analog, etc.) We were the second most popular non-technical roundtable after the Genealogy one, and we hosted chats with a lot of amazing writers and actors (JMS included, as well as a lot of the folks from ST:TNG). Never knew that GEIS was involved in that e-mail! GEIS and GEnie are pretty much a forgotten part of the pre-internet days, it was a pleasant surprise to hear it nearly 40 years later.

That Floppy disk flying though 😂. Fly safe

"When you don't have tons of other people clogging the airwaves". Or when you don't have air, only waves.

Reminds me of stuff we used to do in ham radio. We'd shoot analog TV from a small plane to support Civil Air Patrol and ground-based SAR missions, and since the audio would have been useless anyway, we'd use it for Bell 202 + AX.25 in APRS format so we could send GPS or LORAN-C position data to let the ground station keep track of where we were. Those old AFSK modes are surprisingly robust.

The password for that Mac on STS-43 was ANYSEES. As for your question, Scott, they started using the Thinkpads over the GriDs during the time of the Shuttle/Mir missions. The last Grid flew in April 1998 on STS-90. The first Thinkpad flew on STS-61 in December 1993 (on Windows 3.11) - so there was a great deal of overlap as most missions had multiple laptops of both types. They were also flying a Pansonic Solbourne portable workstation to be used with DTO-667 PILOT. The beloved Mac Portable flew on STS-41, STS-43 and STS-55. After that they went with a darker grey Macintosh Powerbook on several missions.

Not just “don’t have tons of other people clogging the WiFi airwaves” but also “direct line of sight with zero obstacles of any kind.”

1:59 that looks like the terminal the marines used in Aliens! Edit: holy crap it was haha!

The BBC iPlayer app is normally only available to IP addresses within the UK, but there is a Houston based IP that was whitelisted so that Tim Peake could watch the Rugby World Cup on the ISS.

FYI, we called those "luggable"

So, when was the first SMTP message transmitted from space? 🤔

You come up with some of the best obscure and unique things to talk about. Keep them coming.

Glad you mentioned the computers for the "sentry guns" from the "Aliens" movie.

The floppy disk floating away at 2:49 is hilarious 😂

3:20 I like how they had to duck tape it down to keep it from flouting away lol

This is a blast from the past. I was a sysop of the IBM PC Roundtable on GEnie from about 1986 to 1991. I knew Bill Louden and attended a few GEnie conferences in Washington DC. The IBM PC Roundtable provided a good side income in those days, though most of our income was from soft porn downloads from the files section. Didn´t ARPANET email exist by the mid 1980s? I´d have to go back to some old archives to make sure.