The First Email Message: When Ray Tomlinson Changed Communication Forever
The concept of electronic mail, allowing computer users to exchange messages over networks, dates back to innovations of the early 1960s. But email as we know it today traces its origins directly to Ray Tomlinson, an American computer programmer who sent the very first network email back in 1971. Through his pioneering work, Tomlinson fundamentally transformed communication.
Genesis of a Brilliant Idea
Tomlinson worked at the Boston-based company Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN), which in 1969 had won the contract to implement ARPANET – the predecessor to today‘s Internet funded by the U.S. government‘s Advanced Research Projects Agency. As part of this work, Tomlinson helped develop an internal email system on BBN‘s time-sharing computers called SNDMSG. This allowed users logged into the same machine to easily exchange messages by addressing notes to each other‘s mailboxes on that system.
Meanwhile, BBN programmer Tom Van Vleck had created a more limited email program at MIT in 1965. And file transfers between remote ARPANET machines over the fledgling network‘s connections were enabled through a basic protocol called CPYNET. Building on these previous innovations, Tomlinson envisioned something grander – a way for SNDMSG users to also send notes across the network directly to mailboxes on distant machines.
The Breakthrough System
By merging the capabilities of the SNDMSG local mail program and CPYNET‘s remote file transfer functions, Tomlinson created the first proper network email. But allowing users to address each other across multiple systems brought unique challenges. Tomlinson devised the now universal addressing format – with the "@" sign separating local account names from destination hosts. The first test messages successfully sent this way electrified BBN‘s team.
As Tomlinson later recalled, "The test messages were sent between two machines that were literally side by side…The first message was QWERTYUIOP." Those ten redundant letters may not seem profound. But they heralded a communications transformation well beyond what Tomlinson imagined at the time. Email fundamentally changed how we work and live.
Viral Spread of Networked Mail
Tomlinson quietly rolled out his upgraded email system internally at BBN. The ARPANET consisting then of just 15 nodes adopted this email standard by 1972, allowing researchers nationwide to easily correspond. Email proved so popular that it accounted for 75 percent of early ARPANET traffic. As networking expanded, email became ubiquitous across university campuses and companies.
Beyond just person-to-person messages, innovations like mailing lists and carbon copies emerged, allowing one email to reach mass audiences. By the 1990s free webmail paved the way for over a billion personal accounts today. We have Tomlinson to thank for pioneering this capability – even if early SPAM marketers rank among email‘s other unfortunate pioneers!
Lasting Impact
Just as Gutenberg‘s printing press democratized information, Tomlinson transforming messaging from physical letters to instantly delivered electronic notes revolutionized communications. Today globally over 300 billion emails send each day, facilitating both personal conversations and monumental business deals. None would have happened without Tomlinson‘s vision for improving clunky computer mail into a fast, cheap, and borderless medium that changed the world.
