Mail Call

I remember in college checking the mail. We had those little boxes at the mail station in the student union, you know the kind with the little window. I remember getting excited when I you could see some of the light from the other side was blocked, meaning there was some mail in there. It was even better when it was a package slip!! When you had a care package from home, everyone became your best friend.

With my new job at IBM in 1985 was I still happy to see mail in my apartment mailbox. At work we also had 'mail folders' out near the secretarial area. I probably checked that at least twice a day. In those days we still got a lot of paper memos, many with 'buck slips' attached. Those little slips with everyone's name on it and you crossed off your name and bucked it on to the next. Who had someone in their department that was infamous for having the buck slip items get stuck in their mail folder?

Then there was, be still my heart, notes delivered via CMS NOTE command. I could write to people in my own department or around the world via NOTE. The VM systems were interconnected and magic would get them from here to there and back again. We also had tools such as NAMES and RDRLIST to handle contacts and look at the notes others sent you. This was really fun. I mean, this really helped facilitate business.

Due to a tragic error (i.e. user error) some of my earliest mail is no longer available. This is the oldest one in my NOTEBOOK files and triggered a lot of memories:

Later I would be introduced to PROFS (Professional Office System) which would evolve into IBM OfficeVision which ran on a few IBM platforms, but ran best on VM (OV/VM). OV not only included mail and contacts, but also calendar and document facilitation. Oh, and those calendars and documents could be shared and had built in management functions. Hmm, perhaps Lotus and others didn't invent collaboration software after all!

The dependency of corporations on OV/VM was measured by how they reacted when there was a problem. I would see how the "Profs" system being down would go from "the what?" to "How can we get anything done with this running slowly?!!"  Corporations became more and more dependent on this collaboration software. The buck slip started to fade away. The marketing sound bite used in that era was "9 million people log onto OV/VM each day". By today's standards, that may not seem like a lot, but in 1991 that was real penetration in the market place. I believe the largest single VM system in the OV/VM usage was around 20,000 seats. Amazing for that era, and still respectable by today's standards.

The OV/VM team when I worked with them was based out of an IBM lab near Dallas. They were a good team and worked well with the VM team. They cared about performance, and not just speeds and feeds. I remember working with them to implement data collection in the VM monitor data stream.

Besides OV/VM there were a number of other mail related VM tools. Internally within IBM, many people used Mailbox. Outside of IBM, the most well known one would be MAILBOOK or the predecessor, RiceMail. Additionally, z/VM supports SMTP and a very impressive implementation of IMAP.

Over the years, mail and electronic mail became less fun. It became part of "work". The ever increasing snowball rolling down the hill after me. I started capturing the data for the graph shown below a number of years ago for a productivity study of sorts. Can you pick out the months where we had a major deliverable or a critical customer situation? I shouldn't complain about my email load, as I know others get far more than I do.

Email History

I recall a fair amount of gnashing of teeth as we migrated off of OV/VM onto the newly acquired IBM Lotus Notes. The stability of it did improved significantly when it was moved to run on Linux on z/VM. Hooray! My mail is back on z/VM. The numbers above don't include the messages I get from IBMVM and LINUX-390 listserver lists. Those still go to my z/VM userid reader and I don't always consider them work.