What was almost certainly in the email Powell sent Clinton was the story of his successful efforts to drag the State Department into the modern age. I worked for State during that period of time, and watched it happen.
When the rest of the world was working on PCs and using then-modern software in their offices, State clung to an old, clunky mainframe system made by the now-defunct company WANG. WANG's version of a word processor was only a basic text editor with no font or formatting tools. Spell check was an option many locations did not have installed. IBM had bid on a contract to move State to PCs in 1990, but was rejected in favor of a renewal of the WANG mainframes.
WANG email, itself seen inside State Department as a major innovation when launched in 1991 (dates are approximate, as upgrades took place globally on a rolling basis), worked only inside the Department until around 1995 or so, when it could finally be used to send and receive outside email via a cumbersome workaround. Until then, State could not communicate by email with any other government agency, never mind a public rapidly moving online.
Until Powell demanded the change, internet at State was limited to stand-alone, dial up access that had to be procured locally. Offices had, if they were lucky, one stand alone PC off in the corner connected to a noisy modem. If you wanted to use it, you needed in most cases to stand in line and wait your turn.
The White House on Thursday confirmed that what appears to be a recurring bruise on Trump’s...
