One of the first uses of the nascent internet in the 1990s was to bring people together via email. Before Facebook, WhatsApp or texting, epic email and USENET threads were the main ways of communication. AOL users were infamous for hitting the “Reply All” button, quoting entire messages, and saying “me too.” With some of the older email clients like Pine, this led to very uncomfortable scrolling as you had to scroll past numerous levels of one-line or one-word responses before you got to the actual message, which was buried in a series of “>” quote symbols.
With the email quotas of college email systems in the 1990s, this meant that you would often fill your quota quickly and sometimes your friends got the dreaded delivery failure message because your mailbox was full. This was especially true during March Madness, when tournament brackets would swamp email before Yahoo! Sports and ESPN.com started their online ones.
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