Message Handling System Standards and Office Applications

The author of this chapter made the following prediction in 1977: “During the next 50…years message systems will have as great an impact on the way business is done in our society as the impact that the telephone had on business practices during the last 100 years” [1]. That same article went on to describe some of the benefits of electronic messaging used for interpersonal interaction. Messaging was described in terms of an electronic post office box—a kind of data base where messages could be entered by a sender and retrieved at a later time by one or more recipients. This approach to messaging grew out of experiences on the U.S. Department of Defense arpanet in the mid-1970s.