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When I was a kid, the high point of the day was to go to the mailbox and see if any mail came for me, and I'm still stuck in that mode.

'You've got mail!' exclaims the cheery automaton at America Online. The flag on the mailbox icon waves invitingly on my computer screen. For a second, I'm 10 years old again, waiting for the postman's whistle to slice the stillness of an Australian afternoon.

I got into computers back in the early '80s, so it was a natural progression of learning about e-mail in the mid-'80s and getting into the Internet when it opened up in the early '90s.

I came home in the afternoon to sleep, and there was this e-mail from Comedy Central saying they were interested in having me be part of this new show called 'Jump Cuts'! So I called them right away, and the producer started laughing and said, 'We sent that e-mail one minute ago - you're so fast!'

It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there's an email, most of the time there's a letter, someone wants something of you.

I was in my mid 20s when email finally took off. Until then, the phone was my primary way of connecting with the people in my life.

I was late to the Internet. I didn't really understand what it was. I didn't know what an email was.

I think when I first realized that something interesting had happened was probably in 1994. There was a 25th anniversary of the ARPANET celebration and... somebody asked the question, 'Where did email come from?' I remembered that I had done this little program back in 1971. People looked back and nobody could find anything that predated it.

We get a ton of email; everybody does now. It gives us a kind of a pulse that you can feel. We hear people saying, thank you for being fair, for being balanced.

I use my iPhone as an alarm, so when it goes off, I pick it up and casually scroll through whatever emails may have come in while I was asleep.