WHEN historians of the future study the ways information technology affected people’s lives in the late 20th century, they will surely recognise e-mail as one of the most profound. Today, about 2.5m e-mails are sent every second. The first e-mail of all, though, was sent 45 years ago by Ray Tomlinson.
Mr Tomlinson did not invent electronic mail. The practice of transmitting messages between terminals attached to the same central processing unit (CPU), using programs such as SNDMSG (sendmessage), had been around for a while. He did, however, transmit the first message between terminals attached to separate CPUs, albeit that these two computers stood side-by-side in the same room. There had been no command from on high to invent network e-mail, he said. It just seemed like “a neat idea”.
The messages he sent then, late in 1971, were, he said, “entirely forgettable. I have, therefore, forgotten them.” Later, he would send a message to the rest of his group of programmers telling them how to send messages over the network. “The first use of network e-mail,” he said, “announced its own existence.”
In those messages...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1YnuHMy
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