These days everyone and their dog is on the net, tweeting and twittering, plurking and powncing, uploading their status to Facebook and hotlinking everyone else’s images on MySpace. And, of course, sending masses of email back and forth. It’s a wonder we can cope with all these stray electrons.

It’s twenty years ago in January that I got my first email address. In the good-old-days, before email was commonly used beyond the military and academia, and certainly well before the web took off (I’m talking here of late 1980s-very early 1990s), a tale can be told of how easy it was to offend and how easy it could have been for young people in love to lose their jobs because of someone called JANET.

JANET, was the UK’s Joint Academic Network, the system running .ac.uk email etc. It was an essential tool for me and my colleagues working in offices associated closely with academia. However, around 1990, my then girlfriend (now my wife) was working for a tech startup in Cambridge, in the so-called Silicon Fen, and had multiple roles within the company, including being charged with testing their fledgling email setup.

Needless, to say in the flush of youth, she was sending me little love-letters from her newly established test account and I, being as flushed as she would reply from my JANET account (which wasn’t prohibited so long as it was done in one’s lunch hour, which it was, of course).

Our little notes got slightly more lewd with each missive. I’ll spare you the details, suffice to say that suggestions for that evening’s prenuptial entertainment were often discussed in some arousing detail. After a couple of days of…ahem…testing the system, my wife-to-be stopped responding. Or, at least I thought she’d stopped responding. It was just after a particularly provocative message had been exchanged, that I got a call to go and see my boss’s boss. I thought I was about to receive a promotion, or perhaps a much-needed Christmas bonus to help with our wedding plans.

It was not to be. Apparently, JANET had been on the phone, complaining of email abuse and screaming blue murder and threatening to disconnect the organization. It seems, you see, that every single message my fiancee and I had exchanged had bounced back to the primary postmistress on the .ac.uk domain and she, had been manually forwarding them back and forth. The increasingly overt sexual tone of the emails had got her all hot under the collar and she’d pulled the plug. Hence the silence from my would-be significant other.

My boss’s boss gave me an oral spoken warning and that put paid to the heated exchanges between my girlfriend and I…at least until we set up an encrypted link between us to spare JANET’s blushes. Aaaah, young love in the digital age, eh?