Cleaning up at home, I just found a dot-matrix (!) hard copy (!!) of an e-mail my folks sent me on January 17th, 1996 at my very first e-mail address.

Keep in mind, in early 1996, I had to take a subway across town to the university computer room (yes, "the", not "a"), and hope that a machine was free to get into the UNIX e-mail system. Still it was cheaper than phones or airmail postage across the Atlantic.

So what was my first e-mail address?

Here goes: x9520053@smail1.rrz.Uni-Koeln.DE - and if you got the capitalization wrong, it never arrived. And a piece of cake to memorize ...

I just noticed my dad already had a really good initials+last-name kind of address. He was way ahead of me!