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The First Email Ever Sent

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the stuff-of-legends dept.

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?

14 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. The WEB launched the revolution by DeadVulcan · · Score: 4

    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.
    1. Re:The WEB launched the revolution by rho · · Score: 5

      Email is still the killer app. What launched our current Info-economy was the rise of ISPs, not the Web. The Web helped bring people in, no doubt, but they stayed because of email, not some kid's "Welcome to my Home page on The wWeb" Geocities site, complete with BLINK tags and a poorly captured QuickCam image of his cat.

      --
      Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
  2. Oh, C'mon.... by djocyko · · Score: 4
    It is perfectly obvious the first email said:

    FIRST EMAIL!

    of course, it was automatically modded down by 50 people in its first 5 econds of existence...

  3. Wrong... this was before DNS as we know it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5

    stanford.edu? As if.

    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 .arpa TLD, with .mil being added shortly later. TLDs as we know it didn't come into existence until much later.

  4. Re:Spam! by Kiwi · · Score: 5
    The first spam message of significance was the "Cantor and Siegal" green card spam of 1994. This, notably, was not a piece of Email spam, but was ap piece of Usenet spam.

    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.

  5. The ideal geek attitude by greg_barton · · Score: 5

    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!

  6. Re:Spam! by bughunter · · Score: 5
    The first spam message [in] 1994... was ap piece of Usenet spam.

    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.

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  7. Popularity with Engineers by bughunter · · Score: 5
    "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..."

    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!
  8. A greater accomplishment... by Maniacal · · Score: 5

    A few minutes ago I sent the 42556854215548765th e-mail ever sent.

    I'm erecting a statue in my honor.

    Mike

    --
    MG
  9. Re:What was before email by Teferi · · Score: 5

    > Previous to this, a similar mode of transmission was required which used a waxed string and two aluminium "cans".

    Australia still uses this method for connecting to the internet, actually. :P

    "If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.

    --
    -- Veni, vidi, dormivi
  10. More information... by feldy · · Score: 5

    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...

    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, ...", but the first email
    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.

  11. Re:QWERTYIOP by gallir · · Score: 5
    Old PDPs keyboards had problems with the keyboard which affected to the most frequently keys. At that time keyboards were used mainly for writing Multic technical reports, obscure long shell commands (see www.multicians.org) and programs in rare PLI-like languages which overused the "u" (MUltics, procedUre, modUle, sUbmodUle, Use, sUbset, checkoUt, bUlletins, etc).

    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
  12. Not only the first -email- ever... by Daemosthenes · · Score: 5

    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)

  13. The Second Email by ackthpt · · Score: 5
    Make money by marketing to people through email!!

    Our 800 BPI 9 track tape includes 1 email address!

    Call 1-800-555-1212 for information
    We accept Bank Americard and Master Charge

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    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar