The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, 3rd Edition

Back to the Beginning

The earliest form of e-mail goes back to the beginning of the 1960s. Single computer electronic mail—such as SNDMSG1—simply appended a file on an existing one on the same computer. Then, by opening that file, you could read what others had appended to it.

The first actual e-mail resembling present-day e-mails was sent around 7:00 PM in the autumn of 1971 as a test created by a programming engineer employed by Bolt, Beranek and Newman named Ray Tomlinson, who had been chosen by the U.S. Defense Department to build the ARPAnet: the first major computer network, and the predecessor to today’s Internet. Ray was working in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Network Control Protocol (NCP) for a time-sharing system called TENEX and CPYNET when he sent his first e-mail between two side-by-side PDP-10 computers. He addressed it to himself, and he recalls the message most likely contained the text “QWERTYUIOP,” from the row of keys on his computer.

By the end of 1972, Tomlinson’s two e-mail software packages—called SNDMSG and READMAIL—had become industry standards, right down to Tomlinson’s first use of the @ in e-mail addresses. When Ray was asked why he chose the @ sign, he explained, “The ‘at’ sign just makes sense. The purpose of the ‘at’ sign indicated a unit price (for example, 10 items @ $1.95). I used the ‘at’ sign to indicate that the user was ‘at’ some other host rather than being local.” And when he was asked about spam—well, he said that he had never anticipated ...