London, Email, 1994

When curiosity opened doors

After I graduated from college in the US, I spent six months in London on a work visa through an international student program. I found a job waiting tables at a wine bar, rented a room in a house with ten other people, and spent every free moment exploring the city.

One Sunday, I decided to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. A few people had recommended it, and I’d finally gotten around to checking it out. It was a long Tube ride across the city, and when I finally arrived, I discovered the museum was closed.

I stood there for a moment, unsure what to do. I didn’t want to waste the trip, so I just started walking.

The streets were quiet. Eventually, I found myself walking alongside a college campus. Imperial College, the sign read. I wandered among some of the buildings, curious. It was a Sunday, and everything looked deserted. Then a seemingly random yet specific thought popped into my head: I wonder if I can find a Unix terminal to check my email.

This was 1994. Most people accessed email through shared Unix terminals. At universities, Pine* was the standard for checking email at the time. This was before internet cafes started popping up on every corner, before the web, before browsers, before everyone had email accounts. Before most people even had their own computer. Before cell phones. Just green text, black screens, and clunky keyboards.

I started testing doors. To my surprise, one of the first ones I tried opened. I stepped into a quiet building, roamed around empty halls, and found all of the classroom doors closed.

I kept wondering to myself: is this ok? Am I going to get into trouble?

I climbed a staircase. Still nothing. Another flight. And another.

Then I saw it: a single door propped open by a metal folding chair. Inside, a handful of students sat quietly at terminals. I heard the loud clicking of keys and the hum of computers.

I found myself in a moment of disbelief. I had actually found a computer lab!

And then: is it ok to go in? Will they check for a student ID?

I decided to walk in casually, as if I belonged there. No one looked up. No one asked anything.

Back then, those Unix terminals felt almost public, especially on university campuses. No passwords, no locked doors. Just machines quietly waiting for someone to sit down and type. It didn’t feel like trespassing, exactly. It felt like finding a network I was already part of.

I found a free terminal, sat down, and logged in. I checked my email. I even chatted with friends on IRC* for a while.

At one point, the person sitting next to me started up a conversation. He had an American accent. I asked if he was a student there. He laughed and said no. He was studying abroad, and had just wandered in like me, hoping to find a terminal.

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*Pine was an email program used mostly at universities on Unix systems (a kind of operating system widely used in academic settings) in the early days of the internet, before web-based email existed.

*IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was an early form of online chat. A system where people from around the world, mostly students, gathered in different “channels” to talk in real time. Kind of like an early version of Discord or Slack, but you weren’t watching a chat happen. You were inside it. Just usernames and text, flowing line by line.

Photo credit: Daniel Sancho via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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