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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?
Well, there are solutions to this problem.
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- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
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-->
Oh man, yeah, someone post a copy of it. Damn this is nostalgic stuff. The major usenet discussion (flame wars, etc) about it. Hearing that Cantor & Siegel had legal action against them. Thinking "WTF do I want a green card for anyway?"
Sigh, back then the internet was a friendlier place. I rarely enter the territory of usenet these days - s/n ratio has plummeted in all my favourite groups. Scarily at least 60% of my current favourite web sites were around back then (yahoo, cricinfo, gamesdomain, etc) - although I'll admit I like some of the newer ones (google, theregister) just as much.
And yeah, to get back on topic.. back then (94) usenet was big, the web was growing, mudding was very popular, nettrek ruled and IRC was popular.. but email was still the biggest.
~Cederic
Jeez, dude... chill! Have you ever considered that all your colleagues may be emailing you instead of talking to you because they're scared of you?
I had an officemate whose cubicle was one row over from mine, and she would ring my phone to ask me for lunch or something, even though I could hear her perfectly well if she spoke in a normal talking voice. In fact, I could get a rather bizzare stereo effect going... her phone voice in the left ear and her live voice in the right.
And yes, we were stuck with Lotus Bloats and WinNT 4.0.
I can see the fnords!
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
I second that! I have to know if this is really true - I don't quite believe it, but it sounds so darn plausible. If it was true, I'm pretty sure something like that would have been mentioned in the old Jargon File or Hackers Dictionare, and I know it isn't in there. Or wasn't, last time I read it.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
The predecessor to the NSA line-eater bug was the NSA character-eater bug, of course.
The world's first email set the tone for the rest. It was the world's email first typo, and we yet to recover. (Some more than others: see rasterman.)
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
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
Is that really true?
If it isn't, then I'm pretty impressed that you came up with it.
If it is, that's pretty damn cool. Do you have a link to back it up?
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
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.
One more thing... I remember this issue coming up at a faculty lunch one day, and a few of the long-time BBN employees remarked about how they thought it was interesting they still had the same email address for almost 30 years (minus the .com part, which came a little bit later)....
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!
Oh, I remember it vividly. They hit every newsgroup. Even the moderated ones! They (gasp!) forged the approval header. I remember purposefully causing huge (almost a megabyte!) core dumps so I could the files to indirect.com multiple times a day for the rest of the week.
Angry Usenetters put that company out of business for a LONG time because of a single Usenet spam incident. Today the same thing isn't even worth a second of thought, and that is exactly why we were so upset. We all knew exactly what the internet was going to look like in a few years, and it hurt.
p.s. I just realized what I want for Xmas -- an original Joel Furr "Green Card Lawyers" t-shirt, to match my Serdar Argic / Zumabot t-shirt.
__________________
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
Ironically, it's for redherring.com:
Wm Shatner has decided to leave Priceline (PCLN) and their stock has been worth under $2 a couple for a couple days, the year high being 104¼ in march. Sad to see, I always thought they provided good service. Now they're so desperate they're apparently spamming for revenue.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
Now, it is true that "MAKE.MONEY.FAST" was around before the Green Card spam. However, that was something ignorant college students would send to each other, and it did not have corporate backing. It is also true that people would occasionally post to every single Usenet newsgroup before the C&S spam, but such people were not doing this to try to advertise their product.
Before email spammers starting harvesting email address from Usenet, there was a book out called the "Internet White Pages", which had the email addresses of people on the internet, obtained from Usenet postings. I was glad to be in the 1994 Internet White Pages, and was hoping to be in the 1995 internet white pages.
Then the spammers came and changed all that.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
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!
And it's amazing to me how few people remember that event. At the time, it sent paroxysms of fear and loathing thru Usenet. And they were justified. With the exception of a few moderated groups, and some alt groups that rabidly protect their turf from spammers, Usenet is a wasteland of spam.
And at the time, the term 'spam' meant something completely different: an email denial of service attack, executed by sending the same message over and over and over again to the victim's inbox. Thus the reason the word was borrowed from the Monty Python's Flying Circus skit.
I can see the fnords!
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.
Due to the systematic problems with the U key, Unix developers have avoided its use. For that reason, most of the primitive Unix commands and C keywords did not use U:
cat, ed, vi, emac, find, grep, w, ls, awk, sh, login, rm, ar, cc, sed, sort, cp, dd, df, ex, pwd, man, whatis...
While the U was reserved for infrequent and administrative commands (the overuse of "U" in those command was intended to deter their use to non-experimented users):
su, du, mount, umount, unlink, uname, update, setup, quota, uucp, uucico, uuname, uulog, uustat, uuto, uux, dump, shutdown, showmount, route, cu...
--ricardo
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
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