50 years ago, email appeared

October 2, 2021 marks exactly 50 years since the advent of our familiar means of communication – e-mail. Half a century is a significant anniversary! It was on this day in 1971 that software engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first ever e-mail message in human history.

On October 2, 1971, Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at the Bolt Computing Laboratory, Beranek and Newman Technology, was busy with important and useful work – he was inventing electronic mail. BBN was one of DARPA’s contractors in the development of the Internet’s predecessor, the experimental ARPANet, and Tomlinson was directly involved.

New York-born Raymond Samuel Tomlinson graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one of the oldest institutions of technology in the United States. He later joined Bolt, Beranek and Newman, where he was responsible for the Network Control Program (NCP) protocol, the first network protocol in ARPANet, which was then replaced by TCP / IP. Tomlinson is also the author of CPYNET, an application for copying files over the network.

Like many UNIX computers in the early 70s, the machines in the Bolt, Beranek and Newman data center were multi-user, with different operators running at different times, each with a different user account. At that time, the SNDMSG utility existed for communication between users, which allowed sending simple text messages, but they could only be received by the user of the same computer from which they were sent. For example, a programmer who had finished his job using SNDMSG could leave a message with valuable instructions to another user who would replace him a few hours later. Ray Tomlinson decided to improve this program so that it can send messages over the network.

The most important problem faced by this researcher was the issue of addressing messages when they are transmitted between machines: the designation of the recipient must contain not only the name of the computer to which it is transmitted, but also the name of the user to whom it is addressed. Moreover, one must be separated from the other by some symbol that is not found anywhere else: neither in various programming languages, nor in the markup code of documents, nor in the list of special characters intended for text formatting – in order to avoid confusion. Ray Tomlinson took a close look at his own keyboard. There seemed to be little choice: almost all special characters had already been used in one way or another in computer technology. And then his gaze involuntarily came across the “@” sign, lonely lost in the second, counting from the top, row of keys (In 1971, Ray Tomlinson used the 33 Teletype keyboard). There was no better option! Indeed, in English, the symbol “@” means the preposition “at”, indicating belonging, approach and direction – this preposition can be translated into Russian using the words “on, in, to”. Thus, the address “user at computer” could be written as user @ computer

In general, the history of the “@” sign is interesting in itself. It is first found in medieval manuscripts written in Latin: in the language spoken by the ancient Romans, the preposition denoting belonging to something sounded and was written as “ad”. Monastic scribes who copied ancient manuscripts many times were distinguished by their calligraphic handwriting, and therefore the letter “d” in their execution usually had a decorative tail bent to the left, and the word “ad” often looked like “a∂” on paper. A little later, having merged, these two letters formed the ligature “@”, which successfully “migrated” from Latin to modern English. In addition, the “@” sign was often used by merchants and other commercial people, in particular, in commercial documents and invoices, it denoted the quantity of goods. For example, “5 pieces @ $ 3 each = $ 15” meant “5 pieces at $ 3 each, for a total of $ 15.” And the Italian historian Giorgio Stabile even discovered a letter written in the 16th century. a merchant from Florence, in which the “cost of one @” was mentioned, most likely – an amphora with some content.

Russian-speaking users are accustomed to calling this symbol “dog” or “doggy”, while foreigners call the symbol “@” in their own way. For example, Koreans call it “snail”, Finns – “cat”, Swedes – “roll”, Danes and Bulgarians – “monkey”.

When IT specialists celebrated 30 years since the invention of e-mail in the fall of 2001, journalists asked Ray Tomlinson what he wrote in the first-ever e-mail he sent to a nearby computer in the same laboratory where he worked. Tomlinson admitted that he did not remember the text of this letter. “To be honest, I just typed some nonsense on the keyboard,” the researcher admitted, “after all, I did not know then that this message would become historical.” However, the historical nonsense was successfully transmitted over the network, and this marked the beginning of a new era in the history of IT. A little later, other developers got down to business: Douglas Engelbart, the famous inventor of the computer mouse and the author of the idea of ​​creating operating systems with a windowed interface, developed the prototype of the first mail client, to which Tomlinson himself added several useful functions, and another specialist, Lawrence Roberts, “taught” this program to work with lists of messages, save letters in a separate file and turn on the automatic quotation mode when replying to the sender.

This is how e-mail was born, which we use successfully to this day. Today, e-mail is gradually losing ground under the onslaught of popular instant messengers (personally, I know several young people at once who do not know how to use e-mail at all), but nevertheless, this communication channel is still relevant. I think in another half a century we will celebrate the centenary of this wonderful and useful technology.

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *