Edward Susmilch

In September, 1989, Ed was a principal at a Career and Technical Education (CTE) school. He was visiting with parents whose students were starting at UIUC. They began to describe a way to make a local phone call on their TRS80 home computer that would allow them to use their computer to send a letter to their student at UIUC - free of charge, much less than the cost of a LONG DISTANCE PHONE CALL. They called this "thing" electronic mail. Everyone in the room shook their head and asked, "Why?" and the overwhelming answer was, "Who knows?".  Electronic mail was about as useless as "Pong."