SPECIAL STORY: Invention of E-mail

Everybody is aware that Alexander Graham Bell was the well-celebrated inventor of the telephone. However, most of us know very little about the inventor of Electronic mail, despite the fact more emails are transmitted every day that phone calls. Email was invented in late 1971 by a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson. At the time, he was working on a project called ARPAnet, which would later spawn what we now know as the modern Internet.

From this important era in computing, came several major developments:
electronic mail the technology to send simple messages across a network at the time, Ray was working for BBN. In 1968, This company had been hired by the US Defence Department to create the early version of what’s now called “The Internet”.

Mr. Tomlinson had been performing experiments using a program called with a well-liked program he had written named SNDMSG, which he himself had coded as a hobby project. This program quickly caught on, and other users on the network began using it on a daily basis as a means of simple, rapid communication.

SNDMSG allowed “local” uses to leave messages on a local computer to be read by another user on that same device later on. He later adapted this program using a protocol called CYPNET (mainly used for file transfer) in order to give it the capability of sending messages to any remote user on the ARPANET.

Ray decided that the @ symbol would be the ideal marker to identify the computer where the recipient was located. This character would be placed between the name of the host computer and the user’s login ID as a way of breaking up these 2 bits of data.

The first email message ever transmitted was “QWERTYUIOP”, and although it was only sent from one computer to another sitting right next to it, the ARPANET network was used as the means of connecting the 2 systems. As far as the software was concerned, the 2 machines could’ve been in different countries.

At the time, there was no demand for a service like email. Ray Tomlinson simply wrote it for fun, and it took off merely by chance. One of his most famous quotes regarding his motivations behind this innovation was “it seemed like a neat idea”.