Ocassionally Connected Computing

Last week, I called podcasting the poster child for occasionally connected computing. Boy, was I blind! Steve Fulling and I were at lunch today and realized the email is the elephant in the occasionally connected computing room. Back in the good old days, email was a P2P thing with MTAs (usually sendmail) sending mail to each other. Then along came the Internet explosion and millions of people who had, of all things, dial-up connections. The POP protocol became the dominant way clients got email almost overnight. POP enables occasionally connected email and email clients are engineered with occasional connectedness in mind.

Posted by Phil Windley on October 11, 2004 1:47 PM