-- You could print it out and then mail, fax or deliver a hard copy to the recipient. This let the reader see the final form, but to make changes or add comments, he had to write them by hand and then send the whole package back to you so you could input the changes.

-- You could save the document on a floppy disk and then either hand it to the recipient or ship it. This got him the document in digital format, available for editing and revision, and it preserved the original's graphics and formatting. But it was time-consuming and expensive.

-- You could send the document as an e-mail message. You'd first have to convert the document to plain ASCII (seven-bit) text. That way, the addressee received it in digital form, but all graphics and formatting were lost. The recipient could make changes on the digital copy and send it back to you, but you'd have to do a character-by- character or line-by-line comparison just to find the changes. You'd then transfer them to the original document (perhaps by cutting and pasting) and determine what formatting to apply to each change. That might be more work than dealing with an old-fashioned hard copy.

All bets were off if the document in question included graphics, sound files or video clips or was written in Japanese or Russian, neither of which uses the Latin alphabet that ASCII is based on. Clearly, users needed more capable e-mail.

We got that better e-mail with the advent of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. This standard took hold so quickly that today MIME compatibility is simply assumed to exist within every e-mail program and Web browser. MIME offers these features: