Precision is one of the characteristics most often associated with the digital age. But if you ask one of the inventors of electronic mail exactly how old e-mail is, you’re likely to get a vague response at best.
Ray Tomlinson is widely acknowledged as one of the pioneers of the Internet. Asked whether he was really the first to send an electronic message over the newly-formed electric network now known as the Internet, Tomlinson reflects, and then answers carefully: “So far as I know, yes.”
When was that, exactly? The first e-mail tests were performed as early as 1971, Tomlinson says. But it was only in early 1972 that he developed the program called Premiere, which allowed “text messages to be sent out over a network.”
Tomlinson was employed at that time by the firm BBN, Cambridge, Massachusetts to work on the ARPAnet, the precursor to the Internet. That means he is considered as one of the inventors of one of the most successful digital inventions ever.
Today, almost 30 years later, e-mail is so interwoven into daily life that it is almost impossible to imagine its absence. We are at the point where more e-mail messages are sent out of the World Wide Web each second than letters using the traditional “snail mail” system.
But uncertainty reigns regarding the content of that first e-mail message, which passed through a network of only 23 computers in those early days of the Internet. One thing is certain: The message contained no deep philosophical thoughts. It might well have simply been the first row of letters of the American keyboard: QWERTYUIOP, which Tomlinson says is “highly likely.”
It was another invention, though, that turned electronic mail into the foolproof messaging system we know today. In order to ensure unambiguous addressing, some symbol was required that had previously seen only limited use. Tomlinson settled upon the “@” symbol, which nowadays has become an icon of the digital world.
The so-called “at symbol” has separated user names from the network server information in every piece of e-mail since 1972, allowing for a definitive identification of addresses. The symbol is not part of the alphabet and cannot be misidentified by the computer as part of a personal name, Tomlinson explains.
Tomlinson was not personally involved with the further development of his revolutionary idea. While he had created the fundamental standards for the dispatch of electronic mail, it was a U.S. government employee who then wrote a program in 1972 called “RD,” which significantly aided the administration of e-mail.
Before that time, e-mail messages arrived to their addressees as an uninterrupted string of text that could not be automatically answered.
Lawrence Roberts, a computer scientist and one of the administrators of the ARPAnet, developed such fundamental functions as the sorting of arriving messages, which “RD” then allowed to be put into virtual folders for later response.
Roberts also invented the delete command for unwanted letters. Users everywhere are no doubt grateful to him for being able to take the first steps towards vanishing junk mail with the click of a mouse.
