The 1st email HISTORY

The 1st email HISTORY

The first email was sent more than 30 years ago, in 1971. Many professors and students at universities, as well as government researchers, started using email in the late 1970's and 1980's. The introduction of the "world wide web" in the early 1990's led to (or at least coincided with) the explosive growth of email. This presentation explains some of the history of email.

Who sent the first Email?

If "email" just means an electronic message, then the first one was Morse's "What hath God wrought?" telegram on May 24, 1844. An updated version, a voice (phone) message, was first sent electrically on March 10, 1876 with Bell's famous words, "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you." But when people talk about email, they usually mean short messages they type on a computer and send over a network (the Internet) to other people, far or near. That first happened in 1971.

In 1971, there WAS such a thing as a computer mailbox. It was simply your text file that other users on the same machine could add stuff to the bottom of. It was kind of a long running note that other people could add to, but only the owner could clear. It was simple, and worked fine on one machine.

At this time, an engineer named Ray Tomlinson was working writing on a file transfer program that would allow files to be transferred BETWEEN machines. He figured out that his program could easily also add something to someone's mailbox file - on another machine! To identify the users on different machines, he decided to use the "@" symbol, mostly because it made sense. First, they were "at" that machine. Also, two people on two different machines might pick the same mailbox file name, but if their address had a last name too (so to speak), then addresses would always be unique. He tried sending a couple of messages to his own mailboxes at different machines. It worked, and real across-the-network email was born.