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The First Email Ever Sent
konsept writes "According to this article, the first email message was sent in 1971 by an engineer named Ray Tomlinson. Prior to this, you could only send messages to users on a single machine." Nice little nostalgia piece. I can't imagine a world without email, I've been using it for half my life... and I don't really have much of recollection of my days before email. Coincidence?
I have to make a confession. I hate e-mail. I hate it with a passion. E-mail is perhaps the biggest productivity-killer invented since the water cooler. When somebody in a cubicle literally twenty feet away from me sends me an e-mail to ask a stupid question ("Are we going to lunch today?" "Is the IT build done?") I could just scream. There is a primal instinct within me that wants to grab a large club, run over there, and beat them repeatedly over the head, screaming "I'm right friggin HERE!" E-mail is wasteful, it is almost always abused, and it is virtually never valuable.
Sure, it helps with long-distance communication and things like that, but other technologies such as IRC and even weblogs like Slashdot could do just as well. If somebody sends you an e-mail asking a question, you have to look up the information, type it all out, make sure you're replying to the right people, make sure you haven't left anybody out, and press Send. If you're unfortunate enough to be stuck with utter crap like GroupWise or Lotus Notes, there is probably at best a 80% chance that your message arrives at the intended receivers in the intended format in a speedy manner.
People like to claim that e-mail has "revolutionized" the office. And boy, are they right. It has turned the office into a revolutionary, fetid cesspool of blind carbon-copies, attachments, and macro viruses. Within the scope of the last minute I received an e-mail informing me that a women's bathroom in a part of the building nearly a quarter of a mile a way is closed for the afternoon. How much time did I waste reading that piece of crap? Was it worth it watching Lotus Notes lock up for two minutes after I hit Delete? You're goddamned right it wasn't.
I think the primary purpose of e-mail is to make people feel self-important. "Oooh," they croon. "Look at all the e-mail I've got, I must be important." When was the last time you saw somebody really important swooning over their huge digital dung pile of incoming e-mail? People who really are important have things to do. They get things done. People who spend hours reading and sending e-mail are accomplishing little more than creating more work for the poor, silly saps that are on the receiving end. People who worship their e-mail to the point where they only thing they know how to do is create more e-mail are a big part of the problem.
So here's what I suggest: trying talking to somebody on the phone once. Get some exercise and stroll down to a co-worker's office and physically talk to them to discuss an idea. Face-to-face (or at least voice-to-voice) communication is nearly always more effective anyway. And stop e-mailing people. If it weren't for e-mail, tech workers could put out the equivalent of twelve hours of work in an eight hour day.
eMail has been around a lot longer than the PC or terminals. The mitary has had teletypes where you could send a message (email) to multiple addressees since the 1930's. I sent my first in 1964 via the AUTODIN system which used some dozen computer switches that filled rooms and via manual "torn-tape" relays in South East Asia a few years later. These systems worked by message switching (think large "packets" ), Certainly a circuit switching telex or TWX system qualifies a eMail as well. Ron
And here I was thinking that Slashdot was supposed to be current.
m
/.
Note the URL for this article:
http://www.pretext.com/mar98/features/story2.ht
March 98 !!! Wow, breaking news here guys..only 31 months old.
The entire subject of the beginnings of ARPANET/the internet and email is covered in the (excellent) book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late : The Origins of the Internet" available from all good bookstores (Amazon link for the book is here.)
This book was published in January 1998.
Come on
Although as a Genuity employee it is gratifying to see this story here, it is hardly news.
(FYI, BBN became GTE Internetworking, that then became Genuity)
Well, this is what you get through anything that gets commercialized. 20 years ago it simply wasn't a problem. People were mature enough and clued enough that they knew not to do something stupid like send advertisements through e-mail. Maybe this is what we really need to return to. A non-commercial Internet where people can communicate without fear of commercial bullshit.
There has recently been an article about this RPI grad in Rensselaer's magazine. (link: click here) It talks about other RPI grads and their companies that helped to, quoting the article, develop and jump-start the internet.
It would fill your house. Picture a VAX-780 and then multiply it by 2 or 3. Then there are the disk drives and tape drives ..
Certainly you would not need a furnace in your house... the dec-10 would do the warming for you.
We used to have a couple of them at Mcdonnel douglas in St. Louis running in parallel... I wonder if they still are in the 300 Building complex?
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
He was a local call for me, so everytime I got spam from him, I would call him up and bitch at him.
Didn't do anything, but it was pretty fun.
Wowsers, I've had an e-mail account since 1981 which means it had existed for 10 years already.
What scares me is that I've never known life without a computer/the internet (before it was named as such)/or e-mail. Prior to 1981 my eldest sister's husband brought home a PDP11 that connected to the SDSU's mainframe and I pretty much grew up playing that good ole text game of Star Trek. But it wasn't until Jr High that I got an e-mail account via school and also the PDP11 went bye-bye, but I got my first real computer. Apple II anyone?!?! Being 32 and spending the last 19 connected online via BBS/Online Service/Internet. Does that make me one of the first Kids of the Computer Age?
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
I wonder if anyone thought to save a copy of it? I remember seeing it at the time, and I remember how pissed off people were about it, but I had *no* idea it was going to bring about such a sea change in the Internet.
:-)
In looking back, I'd call that message the first real sign of the commercialization of the Net -- sort of the acorn from which a mighty tree grew. Unfortunately, in this case, it was more like kudzu -- has gone EVERYWHERE in EVERYTHING and you can't get RID of the stuff.
But he's not widely credited as the inventor because his implementation relied on punch cards. Not everyone was able to punch out their e-mail properly.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
People might have been attracted by the web, but they stayed for email. It always has been, and continues to be, the killer app.
People like to talk.
~Cederic
Is this gonna be a stand up fight, sir, or just another bug hunt?
I can see the fnords!
I'm afraid you're incorrect. What you describe is UUCP addressing, used by Unix machines after about '79 (+/- a couple of years; my memory is fuzzy about this because I didn't use Unix back then).
.ARPA or .MIL to all the legacy names.
ARPA mail (described in RFC733 and such) originally used, as an earlier poster said, a modified version of FTP. In fact the early FTP RFCs included mail xfer commands.
As you do correctly note, HOSTS.TXT file (which was well established when I first encountered it in '80 -- it predated the uucp !-notation) contained all the host names and their aliases. There were only 10's, and then 100's of machines on the 'net, so you could fit them all and all their nicknames in the file (like AI, MIT-AI, MITAI, the machine I used the most back then). Eventually this table got too big to fit in a PDP-10 address space so aliases were purged. This was probably around the time of the DNS transition anyway (I don't remember exactly) when we appended
This is all described in the RFCs.
I goofed up that #include... Damn HTML formatting...
*Sigh* thats what I get for trying to get an ontopic and funny first post.
(Yeah yeah, mod me down because you can, but you know it would be more ontopic to spam me than mod me down....)
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
To: Bob.C
From: GCC
#include
int main(void)
{
printf("Hello, spam!");
return 0;
}
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
I think I missed that era completely.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
If that envelope was a letter from her mother that you took out of the mailbox, does your carrying it over there stop it from being mail?
I'll buy that for a dollar. I suppose the only qualification I would have on same-machine email is that either the machine support multiple users, or the remote viewing of email. I have a hard time with the idea of "email" on a single user, single console machine.
What about the first spam ever sent?
I wonder when the first spam message was sent? Two days later?
My little sad piece of the internet: www.mtndewd
Earlier than this.
Could that have been the first SPAM?
And when was the first UCE sent?
One can only wonder.
This is mentioned in "Where wizards stay up late" By Katie Hafner (et al)...
It's an excellent read if anyone is interested in the beginnings of the internet...
Zwack
-- Under/Overrated is meta-moderation, and therefore is Redundant.
They didn't have U's back then. They instead used the letter V. That explains why you often see buildings like "NEW YORK PVBLIC LIBRARY," etc. U was not added to keyboards until around 1983; before that time, the Y and I keys were merely 50% wider to make up for the absence of U. Of course, since this message was sent just by pressing all the keys on the top row of the keyboard, the V was not used that time.
For more information, click here.
... or slashdot posts ...
Wasn't there some law fuss over email not being acountable past a certain period of time due to it's ephmeral nature?
I know my standard echo foo | lpr for printer tests won't go down in the history books, that's for sure...
telegraph is trinary it had a space character :)
Yep...and the local net even had a Usenet/email gateway. Toward the end, I was running my BBS (Skunk Works BBS, 1:209/263) on Linux and had fidogate (or was it some other package?) translating FidoNet traffic back to Internet-standard forms that could be handled by cnews and smail.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
The contents of the first email were allegedly the following:
To: bob@stanford.edu
From: Mikeyboy@hardon.edu
Subject: I Own You!
Dear Bob,
I own you and your pisky 4004 based computer.
Mike.
The second email sent was the following:
Bcc: bob@stanford.edu, Mikeyboy@hardon.edu
From: Ery732@aol.com
Subject: Free! Viagra for a year!
You received this email because you possibly signed up for it when visiting an affiliates telex site. You can unsubscribe from this mailing list by sending an email with the contents "Unsubscribe" un the Subject line to megamailinglists@fnord.com
Since these heady days, email has gone downhill at a rapid rate, resulting in many people using MUDs to talk to their friends.
If only he had known the horrendous abuses most words in the english language (such as e-'commerce', e-'store', e-'toys', e-'bay') would later suffer as a result of adding that 'e' to the word 'mail'...
eDamn him!
"An "electronic Post-It note" would be more accurate."
I'm sorry, this indicates a lack of understanding of the shared nature of the computers in that day. I have email dating back to ~1983. The fact that some of it never left the machine it was written on is unimportant. Several *hundred* people used that machine at the same time.
Is mail from one unix user to another not email? I think it is.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no contradiction
You obviously really think that there is, otherwise you wouldn't have to keep re-inforcing the idea to yourself.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/12/05/telex /index.html
Sometime in late 1971, a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail message. "I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other," he recalls now. "The test messages were entirely forgettable. . . . Most likely the first message was "FIRST POST!!" or something similar."
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
The Jabber instant-messager uses this format too.
Check it out at jabber.org
EverCode
This is one of the most interesting articles I've seen on /. in a long time. What an incredible discovery by a most unassuming person. It sounds like Tomlinson really didn't even realize the power of what he had invented - a tool for get-rich quick schemes, pesky advertising, and diplomas for only $19.95!
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
As the article said, people had been sending messages to each other for some time before he added the ability to send it from machine to machine.
I'd personally argue that even sending a message to somebody else on the same machine (especially if they're not currently available/logged in) would count as an `email' as well. The fact that people often logged into the system remotely from various locations even makes it seem `more like the modern idea of email.'
Still, an interesting story.
no.. there was a proliferation of online services well before "the internet" as a public phenomanon
old school bbs'prodigy, compuserve, and yes american online...
The single largest application of these services was messaging... or rather, some form of email.
-T
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
Anyone else remember pulling shitty porn off the frogpond bbs in delaware?
giggle
-T
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
Not sure what Marconi's first ever broadcast was, but I remember reading a lot about his first ever transatlantic transmission (from England to the U.S.) which was simply the letter "s"... baby steps, I guess.
No, only binary. What it comes down to is there are only two states of the sounder or key that matter: On or off. You're thinking of Morse code. Morse code is a trinary system, but it was transmitted over binary telegraph lines using time-keyed encoding.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Yes, Marconi got all the money and fame, but Telsa invented.
Who sent the first piece of spam?
Or, as Albert Einstein put it:
/S
"The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know."
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
Yea, He didn't need 'U' at all!
...and can't even spell QWERTUIOP!!
Buckets,
pompomtom
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
Hey I'd pay money* to have the guy he mailed it to forward it to me. That would be the closest thing to a historical artifact generated via the ether we depend so much on.
*very little actually, but some....
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
Then again, I was only 1, so I could have been hallucinating the whole thing (2nd hand 60s?)
Yet I digress...
Previous to this, it was incumbent to transmit the information via speech, but this mode of communication was primitive and limited inasmuch as attachments were impossible...
Not quite - I'm reminded of an old WWII story (OK, it was in a book of funny quotes) related to the rivalry between the Allied commanders in North Africa (Patton and Montgomery) while beating Rommel back...
At one point, Patton sent a message to Montgomery saying (something along the lines of) "Either get out of our way, or leave us your petrol (or 'gas' for the Yanks :-P)". A while later, Montgomery's forces made a huge advance and in reply, the Brit sent a lone private to Old Blood 'n' Guts, with an "attachment" of a can of petrol, and the (verbally delivered) message of: "We hope that this is sufficiently far out of your way, and offer this can of petrol, which is all we can spare at the moment."
So, even back in the day, attachments were an integral part of communications :-) Offtopic? Hell No!
The conclusion of your syllogism, I said lightly, is fallacious, being based on licensed premises
Question: would you give your phone number out on a forum such as this? That's how how I treat my main email address (not the semi-spamproofed one above, which is real btw). With the increase in size of the Internet, er, community and subsequent likelihood of freaks/bots finding it, I only give my real address out to people I know, just as I would my personal phone number (00-353-xx-xxxxx). It's not the hardest thing in the world; just be sensible.
The conclusion of your syllogism, I said lightly, is fallacious, being based on licensed premises
You're confusing the name of something with its description. The guy who invented the windbreaker wasn't the first guy to break wind, for instance. Also, one might argue that a message that stays on the same machine is left, not sent.
It's an outdated acronym for Quickly Wiggle Every Rotating Thing You Insert On Purpose. Nowadays it gets shortened to a goats.cx link.
recently discovered a 6-inch disk-shaped piece of chipped flint on which was an approximately 10,000-year-old painting of a figure representing what appears to be a hunter chasing a gazelle, waving a sharp stick. Indentations for thumb and forefinger lead experts to believe the design was for easy flinging, perhaps the first example of instant messaging, as it was found in what appears to be a Homosapien skull. Nearby, another skeleton was found with a gourd donned atop its skull, perhaps the first known implementation of a spam filter.
I'm sure the email let me know how to make big money fast, all while working from home!
I did some research, and was able to dig out his first message. It wasn't "qwertyuiop" as he thought, it was in fact:
Hello, my name is David Rhodes.
A year ago, I was in debt. The bills were piling up and I......
=)
[rememeber that annoying mail? For those that don't know, the joke is that that was one of the original Make Money Fast emails]
bob@hardon!somehost!someotherhost!stanford
to
tom@biteme!anotherhost!yetanotherhost!bitnetsite
required tacking !BITNET (caps required) to the second address.
Admittedly, my internet knowledge dates from about '89, but I used to work with someone who remembered a 4K RAM mainframe, and I do remember sending .BITNET mail.
the chicken
AF-Design, web development.
I'm sure the first mail ever sent was a test email to make sure the bloody system actually worked. Jeff
Just my 1.4 cents (after taxes)
He really doesn't want to admit it know, but the first email ever sent was spam for a MLM group, offering scientists the revolutionary opportunity to join and sell this product. "Hurry, act now!"
------------------------------------------
If God Dropped Acid, Would he see People???
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Thank you, good AC..
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
>[...] who decided that the standard paper size in North America should be 8.5x11" (was it a person or a committee)?
According to a story on NPR's "Morning Edition" within the past couple of weeks, the size of a standard sheet of paper in the U.S. (8 1/2" x 11"), as well as the file folders, filing cabinets, etc. to support it was determined by the Remington Typewriter Company's decision on what width to make the platen of their typewriters...
LaoK
I don't give a rat's ass (or any other body part) about email 30 years ago. The Internet wasn't as we know it today until just a few years ago.
This bit of information is about as useful to me as Al Gore's claim to have invented the Internet.
In my day, we used bang-paths: foovax!kgbvax!decvax!user. We would put at least four bang-paths in our sigs... this was studly. You want to email? find decvax, ucbvax, or some other big host, and just paste the paths to get the routing.
Trivia: the first Usenet troll post was probably circa 1982: Tom Karzes posted a long message to the food group. He requested/advocated recipes for dormice, organs, and long pork. Many replied.
Before email , there was Netmail. Anyone here who used FidoNet ? Ex - 2:291/1933.12
...The first ever spam email was sent out, making yet another event in history, that has impacted nearly everyone's way of life.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Then don't use snail mail. There are dead-tree-spam and mail bombs. Don't have a telephone, there are telemarketers. Don't listen to the radio, there are advertisements. Don't watch tv, it portrays Bad Things (TM). Your logic is flawed, unless you live your entire life in the wilderness with no connection to society, which you clearly don't since you posted here.
I wish some Lawyers on here would help all of us spamees escape the evil of Benchmark supply. I hate that company. They break every rule to legitimate e-mail advertising possible and they don't stop for anything.
All I want is 5 minutes in the ring with the owner.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I am so glad to read this! Somehow I missed it the first time.
Man I hated that guy. I called that company so many times and every time I got a little more pissed off.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
If I opened the envelope when no one was in the woods, would it make a sound?
If I carry an envelope from the desk over to my wife on the couch, is it mail?
Tomlinson's new program almost instantly became the first killer app. "After we delivered the enhanced version of SNDMSG to other sites, (so that there was someone out there to talk to) virtually all my communication was via e-mail," he remembers. Two years later, a study found that 75 percent of all traffic on ARPANET was e-mail.
How long did it take for pr0n to take over as number one? What is the breakdown on the Internet these days between the different protocols?
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
Actually I'm not convinced. There were systems in the UK in the late 60s (I think part of the EPSS) which could send messages between users of different machines. I saw one demonstrated in 1969 and while my memory may be fuzzy (I was in high school then) it was clear that the message traveled between two machines.
"One of the advantages of the message systems over letter mail was that... one could write tersely and type imperfectly...and the recipient took no offense... one could proceed immediately to the point without having to engage in small talk first..."
/read/ years later.
Email is the "no-brainer" killer app!
As techs and maybe even engineers know, email can be highly detailed, and can be
Do I remember in great detail any given incident of someone showing me or telling me something? Well, yeah, but.. I don't remember what I tell other people. Sometimes wish I could backspace or delete...
OK, I just like poring over my own brilliant writing. %}
A side note to all
I stronly believe he's not human, he lives within the fiber, a repeating signal that has grown more powerful. How else could this email/memory coincidence be true? Yes, yes, he's a fiber being. Kill him, before he steals your ebay account. Mwhahahaah.
The only fool bigger than the person who knows it all, is the person who argues with him.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Much of the 'net traffic is already going through optical fibres. Also, computing in general is moving towards photonics because of the speed limits imposed by electronics. Some day there may be nothing electronic between two people sending each other 'email' - will it be called pmail instead? And what about eThis and eThat eBusinesses?
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Oh not at all, it was just a second of mis-inspiration.
If it isn't, then I'm pretty impressed that you came up with it.
I am happy you liked it, I have no idea how it came to me. May be because I also noticed the lack of the U and I had a telnet next windows.
--ricardo
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
I think most activities in which human beings engage could be described as email since the brain works by electricity. :-)
If I recall correctly, the first text ever sent over the internet was "lo" because it crashed before they could finish typing "login". not much has changed I guess 8)
-Stype
-Stype
Bus error -- driver executed.
I think his last statement about inventions happening "on the heels" of other inventions tends to obscure all of them, is the most significant observation.
.html syntax/prefix will exist (I forgot who invented those). It feels like a more elegant notation, like Mr., Mrs, or Jr.
However I do think that the @ sign will last longer then the http:// and
I suspect that when the "website" and "web address" have been replaced by something cleaner, I still think plaintext name@domain will still exist because I can't think of way to make it any simpler.
This guy's name will be remembered. What was it again?
---
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
What the hell happened to U character?
http://dtum.livejournal.com
No it is not a coincidence, you just have a bad memory. Admit it!
don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
..no one has come up with a more perfect way to cull the good from the bad.
Are YOU listed?
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 07:44:31 -0500
From: cindy697319@777.net.cn
To: Undisclosed.Recipients@mydomain.com
You have seen it on TV! Hard Copy, Howard Stern, Extra, Inside Edition, Etc...
You have heard about it from friends!
Now go and see for yourself!
Click http://1082394634/hardcore_celeb/index.html
The site they don't want you to see.
The site that they want shut down, but the first amendment protects us!
Click http://1082394634/hardcore_celeb/index.html
If link does not work, cut and paste in your browsers window.
remove 98572kelly@ucs.com.tw
-
I wonder if they had any idea what they were starting.
Penguins love fish, but hate SPAM. The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
Well, I must admit you are right, so it probably means that I'm wrong. *sigh*
____________________
Ni!
Long tone
Short tone
Silence
____________________
Ni!
It wasn't until the early 1990s, when GOPHER appeared, that the internet actaully lost usage. My theory is that when gopher made the internet look incredibly ugly, the general public watched more television, people actually started reading books, and engineers began socializing. Creativity thrived. We could have had a renaissance; unfortunately, the web was invented shortly thereafter, and now we have websites like goatse.cx, if you like windows click here, and slashdot, where people are trying to sell their signature space to advertisers.
Got friends?
the egg.
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
Like who decided that the standard paper size in North America should be 8.5x11" (was it a person or a committee)? Who decided to put letters next to the numbers on a phone dial? Who invented the dial tone, and who decided what pitch it should be?
With a little (or a lot) of digging I am sure the answers to these questions can be found. But, like the inventor of email, the knowledge may eventually disappear into history.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
I recieved a singing telegram...err I guess that was actully a strip-a-gram. The procedure was fun to say the least
Oops....you'll know what I'm talkin about in a bit.
the stuff of legends.
My hypothesis regarding monkeys and typewritters revolves around the concept of broken typewritters and smeared feces on
...using a beowulf cluster as a mail server?
You are quite correct - I did stray off topic. However, that was not because I am a troll, but rather because I was posting as an AC. It is difficult to keep ones mind on the salient points when one is not fearing the wrath of the moderaters.
People do indeed come closer through email communication. I for example have gotten 2 internships and 80% of my freelance work through email.
How ironic that your e-mail is Spam protected! You tell me you do not fear spammers, and that they do not affect you, and at the same time use an obvious cover e-mail address to illustrate your point! I find this most amusing.
True, e-mail can be a good vehicle for making friends, as I have found out recently, but I fear it is in danger of being rendered useless as a communicative medium by the sheer signal to noise ratio that it suffers from. I know I would not give out my real e-mail address here on /., and my Hotmail address is swamped by superfluous nonsense.
For myself, I find that 90% and up of my time sorting e-mails is spent sifting through piles of garbage. And I would love to sign up for informative newsletters and the like, but I cannot be assured that the spammers will not be sold the information. The problem in this regard is that e-mail is cheap.
E-mail is like an ever growing organism. Every time you send an e-mail, you are sending the information that will allow you to be contacted. The small world theory means that it is almost impossible to keep an e-mail address secret.
Anyway, back off-topic, I for one know you exist, Perdida, and I am happy to converse with you at any time.
I am your friend too,
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
While e-mail is good in some circumstances, such as for business, I feel it is not a good medium in a social sense. The lack of trustworthyness and the dilution of feeling that is a result of mass e-mailing does not lend itself to mass communication, I have found.
How can you beat the handwritten letter for the personal touch?
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
I was lucky; mine was short: {ucbvax | rutgers}!pur-ee!zawada
-z
In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster imagines you!
Origianlly it was on a network it was to sent email from unix slaves to other peoples accounts who were on the system, so it was on a network it just wasn't on arpa net.
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." -Aristotle Onassis
Whoa, gimme a minute while I recover from that one.
Just to register my dismay that yet another social science type avant garde Internet "user" is telling us what Internet is, has been and will be.
...
Guess you never use telnet or ftp.
telnet is still the MOST useful Internet application
Mein troll,
You are obviously a troll, because you are COMPLETELY off topic.
People do indeed come closer through email communication. I for example have gotten 2 internships and 80% of my freelance work through email.
I have kept friends, and made friends across the ocean.
Spam has accounted for less than 5% of my total email time. I get over 50 email messages a day, all of them useful. I signed up for them!
I know a lot of folks who sign up for newsgroups and then delete the things after awhile without reading them. what a waste of time and effort!
Just because someone becomes lazy and considers the increased amount of information they ASKED for doesn't mean this information is suddenly spam.
Posting as myself to refute rumors of my nonexistence (or existence as a schizoid subset),
I remain your cordial friend
-perdida
Goat sex free since 2001
the first "e mail message" was sent by telegraph and was a Bible verse, "What hath God wrought?"
This was of course electric mail, rather than electronic mail..
Unlike telephony, a telegraph message was put in hard copy form like a letter, and was often picked up at the post office, also like a letter. It was also electric, in that it used electric wires to convey messages.
Of course, the modern definition is quite different. Just something to think about..
Goat sex free since 2001
do you people have any imagination? do you really have to post almost the exact same joke as the previous fifty people have? "I bet the second email ever sent was a spam!" Ha. Ha. You're so clever.
Al Gore never claimed he invented the internet you morons. Stop spreading stupid myths when you haven't bothered finding out the real story.
He said he had a large part in endorsing the legislation which provided the internet with much of its funding and support as it was transforming itself into a commercial success. Which is the truth! He was the main force in Congress pushing for the acceptance of the internet as a mainstream means of communication.
Also...will you idiots please fscking stop it with the "yeah but when was the first spam sent?" comments? Try reading just the first ten comments relating to this topic and you'll realize just how fscking stale your jokes are!
Then we'd all be getting cease and decist letters!
On
Off
Just like any osi model, the telegraph hardware and signals and routing would be the low part of the model (pysical, data-link, network) and the morse and operator would be the upper half (application, presentation, session, transport). Morse is just a protocol that uses the telegraph system, just as ip is just a protocol that uses modern day networks.
What was the @ sign used for before e-mail?
I can't remember what Marconi xmitted, but Morse sent "What hath God wrought?"Sounds more reverent and to-the-point than flowery.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Many college depts I know of had whole buildings
connected to a central computer. Email was
fairly widely used within a single computer.
Video terminals were pretty rare then.
They had to wait wait until (@1975) when there were ROMS
cheap enough to hold an entire ascii character
set of 5 x 7 dots, or approximately two kilobits.
I remember a project in digital lab in the early
70s where we stobed numerals on an oscilloscope
which where store in eight byte registers.
[ Source: Internet Society: "A Brief History of the Internet" ]
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.
Ah, but just imagine the reply, if it had been sent in 2001...
Well, it *might* have happend that way...
Babar
Okay, so I don't have an actual PDP-10, but if you're looking for a little bit of fun and nostalgia, there are PDP-10 emulators available. This page has plenty of PDP-10 software links, and a PDP-10 emulator can be found here.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
You said:
That's even lamer than "Come here watson, I need you."
The quote was actually "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you". Bell had just spilled battery acid on himself, and was calling out for help. The phone happened to be set up correctly to work, and Watson heard the plea for help over the phone. Hence, the first phone call was a "911" call, and I can't think of anything less lame.
My only question is whether the actual call was something more along the lines of "@$%$#@%! Watson! Get your ass in here NOW!". Those were different days, though, and a level of decorum unimagineable to us was commonplace then among certain classes of society.
This page accidentally left blank
The problem with e-mail is the ability it gives to send many millions of e-mails to lots of people.
That's not a problem with email (note the lack of the hyphen--Don Knuth has a good linguistic analysis of why email is hyphenless somewhere on his site), but with people abusing email. It's pretty much like saying, "the problem with cars is the ability it gives people to drink and drive".
I can't let anyone but the most trusted members of my family know about it.
Wow. You mean all of us here at Slashdot are trusted members of your family? Really? Free hint: just by having a address for us Slashdotters to submit to, you undercut the very point you're trying to make.
My own email address, posted at the top of this message, is a spambouncer. It checks email and forwards them on to my real email account, where I can decide if I want to share my email addy with you or not.
So far, I've managed to stay (mostly) spam-free by a combination of judicious filtering and using proxy addresses.
Other people (like this guy) manage to do just fine, too, to the point where he has his Palm VII set up to receive wireless email from complete strangers, just because he thinks it's cool.
(Bruce, if you're reading this: you rock. Way to be accessible to the community. I would email this to you directly, but I don't want to spam you.)
So in other words, KTB, your "I can't let anyone but the most trusted members of my family" argument only holds water for you. There are lots of other people--ESR, BP, RMS, Linus, just to name a few--who manage to get by just fine, even though they get reams more email than you do.
The lack of trustworthyness [sic] and the dilution of feeling that is a result of mass e-mailing does not lend itself to mass communication, I have found.
If you're finding this, you're looking in the wrong places. Some mailing lists, such as the Continuing Time and Millennium's End lists which I'm on, are actual communities. If you think mass email is "remote", then how do you account for the vibrant BBS communities of old?
How can you beat the handwritten letter for the personal touch?
Try investing a little of yourself in your emails. Believe it or not, it really does work.
... that the original copy of this email will be on sale at eBay later this evening. Opening bid $25,000. Cash accepted. No fraudulent bids, please!
Wah!
After going through prototype after prototype, and fixing glitch after glitch, after long hours and late nights and nearly endless frustrations, I have a feeling that the first successful message transmitted via any medium is, "Is this goddamned thing working yet? Hello? Hello? Fuck!"
At the official unveiling, however, the press hears you say "This miraculous new device will transform mankind" or some other PR-department hooey.
--
This is not my sandwich.
In fact, since he sent that email on how to use email to everyone else on the network, the first e-mail was spam. :P
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Al Gore send the first e-mail?
-k
Reverent, yes, but in a tooting-his-horn sort of way, i.e. "What hath God wrought through me, Samuel Morse" He knew what he was doing was important, and he felt like a great prophet or emmissary for heaven. The hacker in this story, though, just invented email and moved on to the next project....
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
I find it rather appropriate that the first email was "QWERTYIOP"... Marconi & Morse had some flowery crap about how this invention was a blessing from God akin to the gift of fire, and meanwhile the hacker, sitting alone in front of a couple computers, just banged on his keyboard to test the thing.
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
And ever since, people have put about that much thought into the content of their emails...
Not fair. Note that the first telegraph, the first phone message, etc, are the first ones anyone knew about -- the first ones sent to another person. I'll bet that Bell had two phones hooked together in his laboratory before he sent his famous message to Watson, but no one claims that the first telephone transmission was line noise, or Bell whistling to himself.
A more fair comparison would be the first message sent to another person. According to the article, this was a description of e-mail and how to use it. Still not an earth-shaker, granted, but not such cause for derision.
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
__________________
It's a nice piece of history -- reminds you where all of this really came from. I imagine the first web page or the first encoded MP3 weren't anything great, either, but it would be interesting to know what they were. Kind of like taping up the first dollar you get when you open your restaurant or deli.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
No, I'm sorry. You're wrong. I suspect a lot of people on Slashdot remember getting out of school the '80's, and being very, very suprised that some people still didn't have e-mail.
E-mail in the 80's? I beg to differ. I would say it was very common among university students (especially computer scientists and engineers, of course) at large institutions, and industry employees at large companies, but not at all with the general public.
E-mail really was the killer app, and a big part of the reason the net reached the density that allowed something like the web to be successful.
Okay, I posted a little too soon. If I had read the entire article first, I would have worded things differently. However, I still stand by my original post.
I'll grant you that E-mail was the first killer app over the internet. I would say that it seeded the information revolution. However, the thing that really launched it, and by this I mean when people who were not in the business of computers started getting internet accounts, was the world wide web.
I'm not really that cynical. I don't think it was just porn. I think the pretty pictures on the web made the internet far more accessible to the regular person. And that was when internet usage really took off.
--
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Just to register my dismay that yet another social science type avant garde Internet "user" is telling us what Internet is, has been and will be.
Hey! That's unfair. I'm a computer scientist. I have a software development job doing UNIX development. I have a four-machine mixed Linux-Windows network at home. I have set up DNS, Web servers, E-mail and I have my gateway set up using diald and pppd with IP Masquerading.
The "digital information revolution" didn't start when computer scientists cobbled together some components. That was the beginning of information technology, not the revolution.
The real revolution (which I consider a social phenomenon, not a technological one) began when non-techies started getting E-mail addresses, and when non-tech companies started deciding that it's essential to get a web site.
And non-techies only started getting E-mail addresses twenty years after the invention of E-mail. My theory (and I'm first to admit it's just a theory) addresses that long delay.
(By the way, I avoid telnet whenever I can, in favour of ssh. But I'll admit to having never used gopher, archie, and veronica.)
--
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Has Ray Tomlinson still got the source for it? I'd love to see that.
And if anyone's got a PDP-10 they'd like to to donate so I can run it, I'd love to give it a home...
Nothing! I was born in 1971 and there was only a big black void before then.
sulli
RTFJ.
Duh. It wasn't e-mail, it wasn't the Web.
It was telnet.
Look at the RFCs. Before the WWW, telnet and proposed extensions to telnet comprised the majority of RFCs.
Just about every TCP service can be negotiated through a telnet connection to the applicable port.
Not to mention the utility of telnet: I'm here and my computer is there...
login:_
There could be the same room or another continent. That's (telnet|ssh).
One of the climactic points of Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon has Randy Waterhouse sitting on the roof of his car and opening a chain of telnet connections from his laptop to Kinakuta, to laundry.org, and to the Ordo building across the street, 20,000 miles to nuke a disk drive 200' away. Not e-mail, not ftp, not the Web. Telnet.
E-mail will always be a channel for trivial information. Important things always warrant a phone call, a visit, a telex or telegram, a registered letter, a FedEx, or a process server. E-mail is a notch below fax, even.
Telnet. That's my choice for killer app.
Maj. Kong, USAF (Ret.)
--
Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
You mean Scumbag San Khuri from Benchmark Print Supply? He got slapped silly with a couple of lawsuits. One of them from Europe. Currently, he's under a restraining order from sending spam ever again. Deja article here
I can't remember - what came before email?
"Email" = "Electronic mail"
How does electronic mail exchanged between users of a single machine disqualify it from being email?
Because mail is delivered to the recipient. No delivery involved here.
It's still electronic mail!
An "electronic Post-It note" would be more accurate.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
this old news...?
Visit my website xpenguin.com -- A linux penguin website
E-mail is a much less formal/traditional method of communication than the other examples provided by the authors of this story. This is borne out by the original messages sent.
The first message sent by telegram -- used to communicate only emergency and important messages -- was "What hath god wrought!" The first message sent by telephone -- used for quick person-to-person communication -- was "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you." The first message sent by email -- used to send garbage messages in circles -- was QWERTIOP. I think that says it all.
Thalia
The article closes out with a musing about whether pioniers of the Internet like Tomlinson will go down in history with inventors like Morse, Marconi and Bell.
Now I frankly think that Tomlinson is not destined for many history books, and moreover that many of the ARPANET engineers will never become known as heroes the way Morse & co. are, but I think it was quite appropriate when the death of Jon Postel two years ago precipitated a wave of mourning throughout the Internet. To be sure, most Internet users never heard of him, not to mention the general public, but if you have any familiarity at all with the Internet's ascendancy, you'll know that Postel's contributions were crucial to its current success. Domain names, IP addressing, many of the basic TCP services such as chargen and echo, the Telnet protocol, FTP reply codes, the MIME standard -- Postel had a hand in developing numerous basic building blocks that now make up our everyday networking life.
Try searching for the author name Postel among the RFC's -- you get 232 hits. And I daresay that RFC authorship is a good deal more significant than authorship of a program like SENDMSG, since it's the open standards that made the Internet's success possible.
The Internet society has a page about him here.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
"Email" = "Electronic mail"
How does electronic mail exchanged between users of a single machine disqualify it from being email? It's still electronic mail!
Any takers?
Sean
e-mail, the application that launched the digital information revolution.
I totally disagree with this.
It wasn't until the early 1990s, when the world wide web appeared, that the internet gained popular usage. My theory is that it was when Mosaic made the internet look pretty, that the general public took notice.
Or I could be a bit more cynical and say that it was when people discovered they could browse pornographic pictures on the net, that it gained popular usage.
E-mail was the second most important application that launched the digital information revolution. It was only after people started using the web that they realized that there was this amazingly useful thing called E-mail.
--
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
FIRST EMAIL!
of course, it was automatically modded down by 50 people in its first 5 econds of existence...
stanford.edu? As if.
.arpa TLD, with .mil being added shortly later. TLDs as we know it didn't come into existence until much later.
Originally, every computer on the Arpanet had one single name, and, before smart routers entered the seen, a person had to enter a bang-path listing every hop to get to the destination:
For example...
bob@hardon!somehost!someotherhost!stanford
Later, with real routers around, every computer simply maintained a list of the network address of every other computer in a flat text file -- simple, eh?
Then, when DNS was introduced, every host had the
At the end of the article, Tomlinson expresses what I consider the ideal geek attitude:
"I am curious to find out if I am wrong."
Words to live by!
In other words, Email was so immensely popular and rapidly adopted among electrical and computer engineers precisely because they could communicate without having to engage in any social engineering whatsoever, or encounter another human being in any direct manner. How so typically engineer-like, in restrospect!
I can see the fnords!
A few minutes ago I sent the 42556854215548765th e-mail ever sent.
I'm erecting a statue in my honor.
Mike
MG
I interned up at BBN this summer, and although I never got a chance to meet Tomlinson, I have a friend, still at BBN, who works in the same dept. as Ray, and had this to say about him...
...", but the first email
Yeah, it's kinda funny how Ray did that -- I've talked to him a couple
times about it.
Basically he took an existing FTP-like program and wrote the email service
around it. He wasn't exactly "authorized" to code it up (i.e. no job
number), and as usual BBN didn't capitalize on the invention (i.e. no
big $$$s). He had pretty much forgotten about somebody tracked it down
around when the web started getting big ('93 or so). All the sudden
people got interested in the history of email -- what was the first email,
etc.
The first email was either "QWERTY" or "12345" or such; just a debugging
test that Ray has completely forgotten. People get all excited, like
it was "That's one small step for [a] man,
wasn't nearly as poetic.
Also, it's quite possible that the "@" key on the keyboard might have been
lost without email, like the cent key (""). At the time I don't think
it's placement was standardized, and without email it's hardly used by
most people. Businesses might use it (e.g. "10 apples @ 5 cents each"),
but more likely they need the copyright symbol ("©"). Anyways, another
funny implication.
BTW, he insists the correct way to write email is "email", not "e-mail".
Rays' glory includes being listed as a "PBS Nerd":
http://www.pbs.org/opb/nerds2.0.1/cast/page6.html
There's a picture there in case you didn't get a chance to meet him.
And with the discovery of this first email message, the shocking truth has been revealed:
The first email ever was, of course, an advertisement for cheap printer toner.
47.5% Slashdot Pure(52.5% Corrupt)
Our 800 BPI 9 track tape includes 1 email address!
Call 1-800-555-1212 for information
We accept Bank Americard and Master Charge
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar