Steve Dorner, inventor of Eudora

tech , computer history

From the New York Times archives, the 1997 profile of Steve Dorner: For Inventor of Eudora, Great Fame, No Fortune.

Today Eudora is vastly unknown, but in the 90s, in the early days of Internet being accessible to everyone1, it was THE program for personal computer users to read email2. I remember his name in the about box, back when such a piece of software could be the work of just a few people. It’s also how I heard the name of Qualcomm the first time.

A few things of note:

The program originated from the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign the same place where NCSA Mosaic and the NCSA web server were born. These two were significant into the development of the world wide web.

Steve Dorner did not get rich, nor famous, as he didn’t own Eudora.

Also he telecommuted from Illinois to San Diego, California, in the nineties.

  1. By accessible to anyone I mean that it was no longer restricted to academic institutions nor to a limited number of corporations, but that the general public could access it as commercial providers offered dialup service. It was not as ubiquitous as today. ↩︎

  2. Unless using AOL or CompuServe. ↩︎