Submitted Photo Cover of “Glory Street and Oblivion Avenue: A year in the lives of two brothers, from the dawn of email.” Courtesy of Amazon.

When was the last time you emailed someone as an act of leisure?

Back in the ’90s, Kevin and Reagan Pufall exchanged a ton of emails. Beginning in September 1995, the Minot natives amassed a prolific number of exchanges, which they have collected and published in a book titled “Glory Street and Oblivion Avenue: A year in the lives of two brothers from the dawn of email.”

The sons of Hal and Sally Pufall of Minot, Kevin and Reagan both eventually matriculated to the University of North Dakota, before settling in Omaha, Nebraska, and Bismarck at the time they were writing to each other.

“It has always been a compulsion on my part to preserve my correspondence. Starting on 3.5 disks and then going from hard drive to hard drive.” Kevin Pufall said during our conversation while grocery shopping for his mother Sally, “But that is what is so great about the digital era.”

Their book serves as a time capsule of life at the beginning of the Internet and email in the mid ’90s, capturing their lives during their first forays into cyberspace. Between trading their new favorite early emoticons and sharing their first junk and chain emails, the brothers preserved an indelible snapshot of what the dial up America Online era Internet experience was like, for better and worse. In one entry, the brothers grapple with the unsettling realization that computer viruses could very well be delivered by email.

“We corresponded frequently, including drawings, and news clippings and such. It truly was a feeling like ‘Science is magic,'” recalled Kevin, “There were glitches and lags, but that was just part of the process.”

Their early emails begin short and to the point, but grow longer and more frequent as they became more comfortable with the medium. Discussions on books, movies, and music appear often, but are broken up by intimate conversations on family, work, and life in general. The brothers endeavored to keep their conversations as true to the original as possible.

“Our intent was to edit as little as possible, because we thought it was valuable to show it as it was. About 95% of what is there was there originally.” Kevin said.

Concluding in September 1996, “Glory Street and Oblivion Avenue” offers a nostalgic look back at beginnings of a form of communication, that has become almost old fashioned in 2022 as social networks and instant messaging dominate the conversation for most people on the planet.

The Pufall’s book is available for purchase in softcover and in eBook format on Amazon.