Introduction of email has changed the way people communicate with each other. But have you ever wondered as to who invented email or who would have sent the first email? Well, let us tell you all this!
The man behind ‘EMAILS’
The man who sent the 1st email was ‘Ray Tomlinson’. He sent his first email in the year 1971 and is also famous for introducing the @symbol in email addresses so that name of users can be separated from the name of the user’s machine.
More about Ray Tomlinson
Born in Amsterdam, New York, Ray or Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was a graduate from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an employee of Bolt Beranek and Newman company, which won the contract of creating ARPANET.
Time to delve deep into the history!
He started his work on ARPANET by developing NCP for a time-sharing system named TENEX as well as a network program like CPYNET, an experimental file transfer program. During the autumn of 1971, he was making some additions to SNDMSG, a local inter-user mail program. Well SNDMSG allowed user for composing, addressing and sending a message to the mailboxes of other users on the same computer.
Dimaag Ki Batti Jalao!
Then, Tomlinson got an idea of merging an intra-machine message program with some other program that was developed to transfer files among ARPANET computers. He says “Adding the missing piece was a no-brainer,” and also says it was “Just a minor addition to the protocol.”
Use of @symbol
First the @symbol was chosen by him for distinguishing between messages that were addressed to mailbox in the local machine as well as messages that headed to the network. He felt that the @sign made sense. He used it for indicating the user was ‘at’ some host and not local.
Here comes the first message
An email message was sent to himself. At that time BBN had 2 PDP-10 computers that were wired together with ARPANET. The 1st message was sent between these 2 machines. The first message was ‘QWERTYUIOP’.
Once he was satisfied with it, he messaged his colleagues to let them know about this feature. The message also contained instructions to place an @symbol between the login name and the name of the host.
Now he is no more, but has left behind a wonderful technology without which we are just ‘Handicapped’ now!
