The history of X.400, and how email was almost vastly different

One of the things I enjoy most about storytelling for startups is digging into the history of how their sector of tech came to be. Case in point: Email, with Buttondown. The more I dig into email with the Buttondown team, the more interesting bits of history I found about how email came to be. This time, I stumbled in bits and pieces into an alternate history of email, one dictated by postal services and telecommunications companies, one that promised to be far better than the email we ended up with. X.400, it was called, and it stumbled before it ever left the gate. Instead, the simpler email went global, and left us with one of the last few remaining decentralized communications tools that has survived longer than the web itself. And yet X.400 itself found a niche, and is still used today by air traffic controllers among others. Here's the X.400 story, and how a complicated idea lost to the simple email transfer protocol. → Continue reading on the Buttondown blog: Email could have…