| As millions returned to the office this week, they were also returning to that bane of modern professional life: the work e-mail. In 1994, the New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook explored the nature of e-mail at a time when the concept was so new that it needed to be explained, and the magazine was still styling it with a capital “E,” E-mail. To examine this new form of communication, Seabrook turned to the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates—who, despite being one of the richest, most influential men in America, was answering his own e-mail, using a “widely available” address that Seabrook published in the article. In hindsight, it’s clear that Gates was helping usher in some of the hallmarks of e-mail—less formality (“no time wasted on stuff like ‘Dear’ and ‘Yours’ ”)—and at least one quirk that hasn’t stood the test of time (“sometimes he put an ‘&’ at the end, which, I learned, means ‘Write back’ in E-mail language”). As Seabrook details their correspondence, he paints a compelling portrait of Gates the individual, whose mother helped dress him into his twenties, and of Gates the tech visionary, whose influence was so vast that he was transforming the wider culture. (Among other distinctions, Gates “probably represents the end of the word ‘nerd’ as we know it.”) A generation later, it’s striking to see how prophetic Gates was about the benefits and possibilities of e-mail—and about the coming digital revolution writ large. Among Gates’s e-mailed observations, one remains particularly worth remembering as we return to our in-boxes: “Email is not a good way to get mad at someone. . . . You can send friendly messages very easily since those are harder to misinterpret.” | 
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