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# Watch This Amazing 1984 Guide to Sending an Email

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by 

[Melissa Locker](https://time.com/author/melissa-locker/)


## Melissa Locker


Mar 17, 2016 4:28 PM UTC

by 

[Melissa Locker](https://time.com/author/melissa-locker/)


## Melissa Locker


Mar 17, 2016 4:28 PM UTC

Next time you’re cursing your iPhone 6s for taking too long to send an email, take a moment to feel grateful, because not that long ago things were very different. Just 32 years ago, our techie ancestors had to connect a rotary phone to a dial up modem before they could send one lousy email to their friend reminding them to watch a very important [corgi video](http://time.com/4079724/corgi-doctor-who/) (recorded from live television onto a Betamax tape.)

A video was recently unearthed by [Thames TV](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChXQL4MqC4ihSVg3SFiszDg) from a British tech show called _Database._ It’s essentially a techie time capsule to show kids what it was like back in the olden days of computing. Originally aired in 1984, the year the first Macintosh computer was released, the video is the ultimate computer throwback. The video documents the amount of high tech prestidigitation it took to log on to the Micronet, which was a sort of pre-internet internet filled with numbered pages (URLs didn’t exist yet) that let people read news and, of course, write emails.

The video has now gone viral, which was not something anyone in 1984 could have dreamed of.

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