'You've Got Mail' not that old, but it seems so innocent

I felt like watching Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan this afternoon, and since the last five times I felt like this I watched "Joe vs. the Volcano," I decided to go a different direction.

I don't think I had seen "You've Got Mail" since its theatrical run in 1998. The whole America Online thing was getting kind of corny by then. I had been hearing "You've got mail!" since 1993, and I think by '98 I had dropped my AOL account in favor of a cheaper Internet provider.

"You've got mail!" always seemed to me to be a little bit goofy, especially when the icon on screen said "You have mail."

It has been only 15 years since the movie came out, but so much of it seems almost quaint. The sound of dial-up Internet and the idea of pages that loaded at no more than 57,600 bps. I remember just before we switched over to a cable modem, my son complained to me about how slow pages loaded at just 57,600.

I had to laugh at that. As I have mentioned before, when I first used computer modems at work in the early '80s, they were only 300 bps, which meant my 500-word game stories would take five or six minutes to send.

You've Got Mail

But the interesting thing about the movie was that it was reminiscent of the time when it was still so much fun to get e-mail, when many of us thought up cute names instead of using our own names as e-mail addresses.

America Online didn't really offer the Internet anyway. AOL's heyday was before Amazon took over retail and before newspapers and television networks started putting everything online.

Mostly AOL was about chat rooms, some reputable and some far from it.

Actually, it was anything but original. More than a decade before AOL came alone, France Telecom offered its subscribers free computer terminals (on loan) to participate in something called the Minitel.

Minitel

Users could make purchases, access databases, post on message boards and chat with other subscribers. At its peak in 1999, Minitel had more than 25 million subscribers out of a total national population of 60 million. It still exists, and is certainly a big reason France has been slower than some other countries to fully buy into the Internet.

This will come as a great surprise to many Americans, who automatically assume everything in the way of progress originated in this country.

But when it comes to the Internet, we weren't first or best except in finding ways to make money off it.

You can buy almost anything on the Net these days. I've bought several dozen autographed baseballs recently. But stores are closing everywhere. It's funny. In "You've Got Mail," a book superstore drives a wonderful small bookstore out of business.

But the real irony is that in the 15 years since that movie, Amazon and other Websites have begun driving the superstores out of business. Borders is gone, Barnes & Noble is struggling.

But hey, we've got mail.

The only problem is, most of it is junk.