Slashdot Mirror
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?
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
Before email, people tended to use the TELEPHONE to send messages back and forward. This was an appliance that allowed voice to voice communications over a limited protocol using (at its latest version) typically a seven digit address.
Previous to that, they would send messages via a binary transmission device called a TELEGRAPH that sent information in an encoded format called Morse.
Previous to this, a similar mode of transmission was required which used a waxed string and two aluminium "cans".
Previous to this, people wrote the information on a flat media such as paper or vellum with ink or graphite in a stylus configuration, and then gave it to a messenger of some kind to relay said message to the recipient.
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, and you were required to be at a limited distance from the recipient (a variable distance called earshot depending on the configuration of the recipient).
Other protocols were used - namely trasmitting information by binary flashes of light, using flags in differing configurations, sending plumes of smoke....
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
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
> Previous to this, a similar mode of transmission was required which used a waxed string and two aluminium "cans".
:P
Australia still uses this method for connecting to the internet, actually.
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
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