The history of email
Written by Ian Peter
Email is much older than ARPANet or the Internet. It was never invented; it
evolved from very simple beginnings.
Early email was just a small advance on what we know these days as a file
directory - it just put a message in another user's directory in a spot where
they could see it when they logged in. Simple as that. Just like leaving a note
on someone's desk.
Probably the first email system of this type was MAILBOX, used at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology from 1965. Another early program to send messages on the
same computer was called SNDMSG.
Some of the mainframe computers of this era might have had up to one hundred
users -often they used what are called "dumb terminals" to access the mainframe
from their work desks. Dumb terminals just connected to the mainframe - they had
no storage or memory of their own, they did all their work on the remote
mainframe computer.
Before internetworking began, therefore, email could only be used to send
messages to various users of the same computer. Once computers began to talk to
each other over networks, however, the problem became a little more complex - We
needed to be able to put a message in an envelope and address it. To do this, we
needed a means to indicate to whom letters should go that the electronic posties
understood - just like the postal system, we needed a way to indicate an
address.
This is why Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing email in 1972. Like many of
the Internet inventors, Tomlinson worked for Bolt Beranek and Newman as an
ARPANET contractor. He picked the @ symbol from the computer keyboard to denote
sending messages from one computer to another. So then, for anyone using
Internet standards, it was simply a matter of nominating
name-of-the-user@name-of-the-computer. Internet pioneer Jon Postel, who we will
hear more of later, was one of the first users of the new system, and is
credited with describing it as a "nice hack". It certainly was, and it has
lasted to this day.
Despite what the world wide web offers, email remains the most important
application of the Internet and the most widely used facility it has. Now more
than 600 million people internationally use email.
By 1974 there were hundreds of military users of email because ARPANET
eventually encouraged it. Email became the saviour of Arpanet, and caused a
radical shift in Arpa's purpose.
Things developed rapidly from there. Larry Roberts invented some email folders
for his boss so he could sort his mail, a big advance. In 1975 John Vital
developed some software to organize email. By 1976 email had really taken off,
and commercial packages began to appear. Within a couple of years, 75% of all
ARPANET traffic was email.
Email took us from Arpanet to the Internet. Here was something that ordinary
people all over the world wanted to use.
As Ray Tomlinson observed some years later about email, "any single development
is stepping on the heels of the previous one and is so closely followed by the
next that most advances are obscured. I think that few individuals will be
remembered." That's true - to catalogue all the developments would be a huge
task.
One of the first new developments when personal computers came on the scene was
"offline readers". Offline readers allowed email users to store their email on
their own personal computers, and then read it and prepare replies without
actually being connected to the network - sort of like Microsoft Outlook can do
today.
This was particularly useful in parts of the world where telephone costs to the
nearest email system were expensive. (often this involved international calls in
the early days) With connection charges of many dollars a minute, it mattered to
be able to prepare a reply without being connected to a telephone, and then get
on the network to send it. It was also useful because the "offline" mode allowed
for more friendly interfaces. Being connected direct to the host email system in
this era of very few standards often resulted in delete keys and backspace keys
not working, no capacity for text to "wrap around" on the screen of the users
computer, and other such annoyances. Offline readers helped a lot.
The first important email standard was called SMTP, or simple message transfer
protocol. SMTP was very simple and is still in use - however, as we will hear
later in this series, SMTP was a fairly naïve protocol, and made no attempt to
find out whether the person claiming to send a message was the person they
purported to be. Forgery was (and still is) very easy in email addresses. These
basic flaws in the protocol were later to be exploited by viruses and worms, and
by security frauds and spammers forging identities. Some of these problems are
still being addressed in 2004.
But as it developed email started to take on some pretty neat features. One of
the first good commercial systems was Eudora, developed by Steve Dorner in 1988.
Not long after Pegasus mail appeared.
When Internet standards for email began to mature the POP (or Post Office
Protocol) servers began to appear as a standard - before that each server was a
little different. POP was an important standard to allow users to develop mail
systems that would work with each other.
These were the days of per-minute charges for email for individual dialup users.
For most people on the Internet in those days email and email discussion groups
were the main uses. These were many hundreds of these on a wide variety of
topics, and as a body of newsgroups they became known as USENET.
With the World Wide Web, email started to be made available with friendly web
interfaces by providers such as Yahoo and Hotmail. Usually this was without
charge. Now that email was affordable, everyone wanted at least one email
address, and the medium was adopted by not just millions, but hundreds of
millions of people.
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