My first email address in 1973 was something like btl!pyuxa!dtm.
I was user ID dtm at UNIX system A in Piscataway which was part of Bell Telephone Labratories (BTL). Mail with ("bang paths" [!]) was transmitted over dial-up lines using modems and the UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) protocol.
I was one of the first people at Bell Labs to start using longer addresses (dtmcbride) because I realized there were going to be too many duplicate initials.

In 1983 my address was my account ID: BCV655 on The Source online service and donm41 at AOL, both dial-up systems (you used a modem connecting your computer to your telephone) at the time.
I've had my AOL email account for almost 30 years. (It wasn't available over the Internet until about 25 years ago).

By 1986 there were other email networks so I had to specify uucp. My address was uucp:bellcore!pyuxc!mcbride
  [Even though the Internet had transitioned to TCP/IP in 1983, uucp (Unix-to-Unix copy) was the way most mail systems communicated with dial-up connections until the late 80's.]

Internet era:
The first internet email address I remember was my work address, dtmcbride@bellcore.com in about 1988.
As I switched Internet Service Providers (ISP) I got various personal addresses , dtmcbride@earthlink.net, dtmcbride@netscape.com, dtmcbride@mac.com, dtmcbride@verizon.net, dtmcb@optonline.net, ...

When I retired in 2001 I got .

When my grad school, Haas at Cal, offered a permanent mail forwarding service, I got that () , so people could put it in their address book and I would forward mail to whatever mail system (yahoo, gmail, ...) worked best for me at the time, so you wouldn't have to change your address book entry.

Somewhere around 2005 when the .name top-level domain became available I grabbed don@mcbride.name. It was simpler than alumni.haas.org, and some spammers had got ahold of my alumni.haas.org address.

There were several problems with .name.
There were two many people with the same name and in my case someone else (I could never find out who) owned mcbride.name.
Network Solutions (the hosting service for mcbride.name) was giving me too much trouble and I don't own mcbride.name so couldn't move it to another email hosting service.

In 2008 I tried to get dtmcbride@gmail.com because yahoo was not working too well, but someone else grabbed it, so I ended up with

In 2011 I got my own domain DTMcbride.name
So I now have , but my yahoo and gmail addresses still work.
I'm actually reading most mail on my Mac Mail App using POP or iMap. So, most of my email accounts get funneled there.