Hello - is anyone there?

MY FIRST article for The Business Times was back in the 1990s when I bemoaned the fact that Singapore Airlines had announced that you would be able to access e-mail on their flights. Was no place safe?

How naive I was. First the telex, then the fax, revolutionised business communications. Instead of waiting on the balcony of the Singapore Club (now the Fullerton Hotel) for your clipper to arrive and reading the flags for the latest news, communication became instant. At first, we dinosaurs resented it because we could no longer tell people that the letter/report/cheque was in the post (hopefully sea mail). We would be found out quickly, and that US client would phone us at home during his working hours (ie the middle of the night) to tell us so. I think only US clients could afford the phone charges.

E-mail seemed a relief at the time because we could put off those client queries until a time of our own choosing. But it became ubiquitous and no longer under our control as it was snaffled up by something called the Internet. Now everybody in the world could send us something to read, like it or not.