From: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, August 7, 2013 3:25 AM Subject: At the moment, the best way to At the moment, the best way to communicate with another person on the information highway is to exchange electronic mail: to write a message on a computer and send it =through the telephone lines into someone else's computer. In the future, people will send each other sound and pictures as well as text, and do =it in real time, and improved technology will make it possible to have =rich, human electronic exchanges, but at present E-mail is the closest =thing we have to that. Even now, E-mail allows you to meet and communicate with people in a way that would be impossible on the phone, =through the regular mail, or face to face, as I discovered while I was =working on this story. Sitting at my computer one day, I realized that I could try to communicate with Bill Gates, the chairman and co- founder =of the software giant Microsoft, on the information highway. At least, I could send E-mail to his electronic address, which is widely available, not tell anyone at Microsoft I was doing it, and see what happened. I =wrote: Dear Bill, I am the guy who is writing the article about you for The New =orker. It occurs to me that we ought to be able to do some of the work through e-mail. Which raises this fascinating question--What kind of understanding of another person can e-mail give you? ... You could begin by telling me what you think is unique about e-mail =s a form of communication. John I hit "return," and the computer said, "mail sent." I walked out to the kitchen to get a drink of water and played with the cat for a while, then came back and sat at my computer. Thinking that I was probably wasting money, I nevertheless logged on again and entered =my password. "You have mail," the computer said. I typed "get mail," and the computer got the following: From: Bill Gates Ok, let me know if you get this email. According to my computer, eighte