Now, to check e-mail from almost any corner of the planet, you only need to press one button on the screen of your smartphone. And now let’s see how this same process looked in 1984.

In fact, what is surprising about this video is not the complexity of the process of checking mail, in 1984 I saw more complicated ones, but the fact that at that time in the West, e-mail was already available to everyone. Portable computers, modems, and telephone communication were available even on trains, even if only in Japan.

We will remind those who did not live the USSR. In the USSR in 1984, only the enterprises had computers and they were VERY large. Single PCs were used only in scientific institutes, we were not talking about any personal computers for the population at all.

By the way, about the modem. What you see in the video is a so-called Acoustic coupler, that is, an acoustic connector or an acoustic modem. The first such connectors that converted electrical signals into acoustic signals and vice versa appeared as early as 1966. The first commercial models – in 1968.