Happy Birthday! Email Is 30 Years Old

pgrote writes: "Happy Birthday Email! It turns 30 and Yahoo! News has an article here. Of course, they have the @ sign listed as a + sign. There is an interesting look at the history here. Two neat things about this: 1) The creator can't remember the first message, but he knows it was in ALL CAPS and 2) Can you imagine your life without email now?"

Comments

the new yardstick

[digitalmuse]

hmmm, e-mail is older than I am (26yrs). and I measure myself through the things I've seen. I remember Ronald Regan as a very young child. I recall my parent's last throes of back-to-the-land/cold-war self-sufficency. I was astounded as the first Space Shuttle launch took us around the earth and flew us back home on wings. I was glued to the TVs when the Challenger exploded. I was there when faxes were pasted hourly on the walls of Boston's china-town as Tienamen square unfolded.
I lost friends in an act of terrorism that the world had never seen before, or even believed possible outside of cheap paperback fiction.
I have done all these things at a distance, I have made friends and effected change on continents that I may never visit.
I have dipped my toes in the greater waters of mankind.
All this in less than 30 years.

How will my children look back when they are my age?
Will they remember a world before the arrival of the meta-verse that allows them to interact around the world, regardless of language, race, time, or class?
Will they look back with sepia-toned memories of the good-old days before corporate structures replaced government?
Might they think of us with scorn, as those who poisoned the earth and water that they inherited?
Or will they think of us as the generation that first tasted this fruit of true communication, and were alternately torn and brought together by it.
pioneers in a digital age where the hot metal was still fluid and a maleable medium, filling gaps and voids in the mold of society.
what will someone say about us in 30 years.
what do we want to leave as our legacy for our children,
food for thought.

Re:the new yardstick

[Vaystrem]

I'm curious to know how you
1) "remember Ronald Regan as a very young child" considering that
2)"On February 6, 1911, Ronald Wilson Reagan was born to Nelle and John Reagan in Tampico, Illinois. "
when you said
3) "I am (26yrs)."
and
4) "All this in less than 30 years."

Re:E-mail helps people find each other.

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course he did numbnuts! Brazillian women are notoriously easy. When I went to Brazil for 2 weeks this past May, I got laid on a nightly basis. Rock on!

Knuth

[srichman]

Don Knuth weighs in on this at the bottom of this page.

Bit of email history

[Simm0]

Interesting how the @ symbol wasn't added till a year later.

1970
Ray Tomlinson of BBN invents email program to send messages across a distributed network. The original program was derived from two others: an intra-machine email program (SENDMSG) and an experimental file transfer program (CPYNET)

1972
Ray Tomlinson (BBN) modifies email program for ARPANET where it becomes a quick hit. The @ sign was chosen from the punctuation keys on Tomlinson's Model 33 Teletype for its "at" meaning (March)

Re:Bit of email history

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, there was one obscure OS that used '@' for something or other

That would be Multics, which used @ to delete the current line input. Which made typing an email address on Multics quite fun, aparently.

Still, Multics sites were outnumbered by TOPS10/TOPS20 and ITS sites and the @ won.

Re:what about after the @ sign?

[Matthew Luckie]

Of course e-mail is great, but at first it was used to comunicate with a few people across the same network. What about the development of the DNS structure? The ability to have domain names and usernames for e-mail is a lot different from the original design of it.

This all happened after Al Gore invented the Internet.

all caps?

[User1234]

He must of been an aol user.

E-Mail is not 30 years old today.

[Bowie J. Poag]

E-Mail is more than 30 years old. Doug Englebart's NLS system was doing email for years prior to '71, and infact, demonstrated it publically in '68.

Get your facts straight, gang.

Cheers,

Texas Instruments +30

[bstadil]

TI has a system called MSG that functioned a text based email system. I used it in 1974 in Denmark and it had been in use for more than five years in the US I was told at the time. It connected all TI sites around the world but the system was based on an IBM 360 something.

Re:Before Email

[Joseph Goebbels]

What can I say, we are a truly inventive people under a great government.

Do the English speaking population have such a poor vocabulary that they have to use the German word "Reich" instead of the English "realm"? In that case couldn't you please at least use the complete expression in German; "Drittes Reich" (and please don't pronounce it "ryke")?

BTW, der Führer says hello and wants you to know that "Führer" isn't pronounced like "fyoorer". Thank you.

Re:baud != bps (usually)

[VultureMN]

"Technically it is just ``symbol per second'' which can mean bits per second, but usually meant (back then) bytes per second, Bps, so 300 baud would be 300Bps = 2400bps"
Umm. No.
300 baud modems were indeed 300 bits per second. You're correct in the "symbols per second" thing, but everything including and below 2400 baud used one symbol per bit, so in those cases baud=bps. Higher modem speeds still run at 2400 baud, but use phase shifting and other tricks so that each symbol stands for N bits. For example, a 9600 bps modem works by each symbol representing 4 bits. 2400 baud times 4 bits/symbol equals 9600 bits per second.
For the purposes of this discussion, "symbols per second" means you're sampling the carrier N times per second.

Before the at@ there was the bang!

[Stavr0]

Before @ addresses were common we had bang paths where our email would hop from host to host with the UUCP protocol.

mailto:sprintlink!exodus!andover!slashdot!stavr0