“Mommy, where does email come from?”
Wednesday, March 21st, 2012Email – a History of the Internet’s Most Powerful Tool
Nearly all of us take email for granted. Most of my generation and those who came after can only vaguely remember a time when email wasn’t as common as a car in the driveway and a McDonald’s in every town. Email has become such a part of our lives that, for most of us, it is likely our primary means of communication.
It wasn’t always so and today, every new communications tool ends up being called ‘the next email’ or ‘the email killer.’ Facebook was called that. So was Twitter. Instant messaging was also called that. The reality? A lot of us interact with Facebook, Twitter, and even popular IM through our email clients now. I know I do thanks to FB allowing email responses to its alerts, Twitter having tools allowing you to get your feed in an email digest, and IM largely being attached as a service to our email clients.
Email is, assuming you’re old enough to recall such things, an obvious next step in evolution from postal mail and two-way radio. As a child of the 1970s and 80s, I remember citizen’s band (CB) radio and being acquainted with a few truck drivers now, I realize it still has a following. No doubt someone in your neighbourhood is also a ham radio operator, speaking over vast distances in a microphone that doesn’t use the Internet.
All of us, even today, likely send and receive correspondence through the post (aka ‘snail mail’) regularly as well. Maybe for the ‘off the grid’ grandma or non-connected uncle who haven’t embraced technology.
So where did email come from?
The Early Days
Email actually predates the Internet and even the ARPANet that fostered it. Probably the first use of email was an old Unix trick in which a person using a system could leave a ‘note’ in a file directory that the person you wanted to receive it would see. Since computers were room-filling contraptions then and one machine would be used by several, even dozens of people, this was seen as a good way to leave a virtual Post It Note.
That quickly evolved into systems like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MAILBOX in 1965. Generally considered the first of its type – no one is sure since so many disparate systems were invented at about the same time – MAILBOX basically codified the file directory Post It idea. Another that may have also been a first was SNDMSG, which was much the same. The big limitation is obvious: only people on the same machine (mainframe) could send and receive messages in this way.
Then Came ARPANet
The virtual envelope and stamp hadn’t been invented yet. That was done by Ray Tomlinson in 1972 while working at Bolt Beranek and Newman on the then-fledgling ARPANet system. Tomlinson is the one who is credited with picking ‘@’ as the email separator and denote for the system to route it. His idea was elegantly simple: give each user a name, put in @, then add the computer/mainframe they’re on. An idea that basically hasn’t changed since.
Within a few years, once the military adopted ARPANet, email took off and software to specifically deal with it was developed. Commercial packages began appearing in 1975-76 and by 1980, 75% of all ARPANet traffic was email. With the fledgling Internet becoming mainstream, email followed and actually drove much of the innovation. Corporations, businesses, and individuals were excited about the idea of easily, cheaply, and quickly being able to send correspondence around the world.
And Now..
The first major email advances were offline – specifically the ability to download and upload email while connected and then read and reply without being connected. ‘Always on’ was almost unheard of in those days and Internet connections were often extremely expensive, often requiring long distance (or even international) calls or expensive equipment and satellite feeds.
As email became more popular, it advanced quickly. With protocols like SMTP (simple message transfer protocol) appearing and becoming standard, things progressed. Today’s email is full of innovations built upon the original MAILBOX and SNDMSG of the early days. The term ‘email’ itself is a mystery, being used in common parlance for so long, no one is entirely sure who coined the phrase ‘electronic mail’ or ‘e-mail.’ It was likely someone during the heady days of the late ’70s when so much was happening with this new and driving force for global communications.
Wherever it came from, it’s almost assured that email is here to stay, in its core form, for years to come. It gives us a chance to communicate, but also allows us to sit back and take our time forming thoughts before sending them on – unlike speech and IM. So expect your grandchildren to still be using some form of e-mail to communicate, though how they interact with it is sure to change.
Email marketing is an incredibly popular marketing strategy–and for good reason. It works! Unfortunately, tougher SP*M filters mean more and more valid messages are winding up in SP*M folders.