those were the days

This is the very first email I ever received, exactly 17 years ago today [high res]. It was the summer of '94 and I had been interested in finding out about Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which was smacking quite visibly into Jupiter at the time. [See how easy that was? This was before links to Wikipedia, kids.]

I was still a high school student, attending classes at Brown for the summer, when I sent the initial email from what was then an awe-inspiring computer lab. Ah, to secure a spot in the sea of black-and-green monitors at the CIT... Anyway, Peter Ford over at MIT kindly sent me some websites to check out (I hardly had any idea what a website even was back then) and pointed me in the direction of Brown's stellar planetary geosciences department. As fate would have it, I ended up taking a super planetary geo course with Pete Schultz, who's mentioned in the email, as an undergrad several years later.

Things to point out in the actual message: It took two pages to print! And gosh the headers were intense back then. This was before we were introduced to Eudora, which Brown used for I don't know how long...through the end of '99 at least. Anyway, I happen to have printed this puppy out and was surprised to find it this week in a stack of stuff I thought I'd long tossed away. Makes me wanna start yammering about trudging five miles to class in the snow, etc. etc.