Email

History of Email

Email was introduced in the 1960s, when people began sending messages to others working on the same mainframe computer. In the late 1960s, Ray Tomlinson set out to create a program that would send messages from one computer to another on the same network. He combined the mailing program used on mainframes with a file-transfer system. To send an email message, the sender had to know the recipient's identification and the address of the computer on which they received email. The ID was separated from the address by the symbol @. Tomlinson's first email message to a remote computer read: “QWERTYUIOP” (the top row of characters on a computer keyboard).

Tomlinson released two programs in 1972 that worked in tandem: READMAIL and SNDMSG. The applications were quickly adopted by early users of ARPANET (the precursor to the Internet), even though they were primitive. The most significant limitation was the fact that people had to use two different programs to communicate through email: READMAIL to check their mail, and SNDMSG to send mail to others. Throughout the early 1970s, ARPANET developers made email more user-friendly and functional, adding the ability to delete messages and to access help files. But even though the program used to read email was improved, it remained separate from SNDMSG.

An all-in-one email utility clearly was needed, and in 1975 John Vittal wrote it, named it MSG, and added features such as automatic addressing for email replies and email forwarding. MSG was the first fully functional, all-in-one email utility. Since the release of MSG, relatively few major functional changes have been made to email utilities. Most of the changes since 1975 have been matters of style and access.

One stylistic change to how people accessed email came with the creation of Pine. Pine (which stands for Program for Internet News & Email) is an email utility that was created at the University of Washington in 1989. Pine was specifically developed to be used by people who were not familiar with the detailed ins and outs of networked computers, and was designed to be simple, user-friendly, and nearly mistake-proof. The main advantage of Pine over other mail programs was its combination of a simple but tightly connected editor with an easy-to-navigate menu system. For most users of email in the early 1990s, and for many people today, Pine was the program of choice.

The rise of commercial network services had significant impacts on the popularity of email and on its commercial viability. Two of the first companies to provide email service to the public, Compuserve and MCI Mail, emerged in 1989. Their early successes [Page 176]sparked the imagination of Steve Case, the cofounder of America Online (AOL). AOL's simple graphical interface helped to further popularize email after the service connected its internal email system to the rest of the Internet in 1993. Commercial services such as AOL opened the door to email for people who did not have university or employer accounts.

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