Hmmm.......back in the early/mid 80's, I had access to a TALK program that we ran on our UK student mainframe accounts that gave us access to BITNET, so that would have been my first chat program. I also had access to PHONE (home grown chat app) written by some system admins that ran on the PRIME mini-computers at UK, University of Kentucy.

Naturally, email was in use at the unversity setting in the early 80s.

I think the very first email program I used outside of a university setting was CompuServe when I was contractor programmer at Mercer in 1992.

In 1995, I loaded the WinNET email program and Netscape on my personal computer. WinNET was one of the internet pioneers in the Louisville, KY market. I skipped the AOL and Compuserve stuff for personal use.

Today, gmail is my personal email program/webclient of choice. Oh, and I still have an old yahoo account, but rarely use.

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daw_two
Germantown, TN

Links:
Sold last car --- 05/2012 1984 300D Light Ivory, Red interior
No longer selling Cluster Needles Paint
No longer selling New Old Stock (NOS) parts

Past:
3/2008 1986 300SDL "Coda"
04/2010 1965 190D(c) "Ben"
& many more