Electronic mail, better known as Email, has been changing the face of communication for several decades. Email can be defined as a method of composing, sending, storing and receiving messages through electronic communication systems. The word “email” is used as both a noun and a verb, and applies to all SMTP-based Internet email systems, X.400 systems, and intranet systems.

How did it all begin?

Before the Internet, there was e-mail: it was probably the most crucial tool in the development of the Internet in the late 1980s. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology first exhibited the CTSS (Compatible Time Sharing System) in 1961. The CTSS it allowed many users to simultaneously log on to the IBM 7094 from remote dial-up machines and store files online on a floppy disk. This amazing development encouraged users to share information in a variety of ways. The birth of email was in 1965, when multiple users of a time-shared mainframe began to communicate remotely and electronically.

While the full history and exact dates are somewhat fuzzy on the details, the first systems to have basic email capabilities were the System Development Corporation’s Q32 and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s CTSS. By 1966, email had rapidly expanded to become network email, allowing users to pass electronic messages between different computers.

ARPANET was undoubtedly a good contributor to the development of electronic mail. Historical accounts say that there were experiments in transferring email between systems just after it was created in 1969. Ray Tomlinson, a programmer involved in the development of a timesharing system called TENEX, was the first person to discover that the various hosts they can be differentiated. using the @ sign to separate the username and machine from it. Until 1971, when “electronic mail” was discovered, machines could only send messages to users within their own system.

The popularity of email was fueled by the ARPANET, and over time, email became the core technology of Internet communication.

Ray Tomlinson – Discovering Network Email

The first person to discover the possibility of sending a receive message between different computers over a network, Ray Tomlinson is the person to thank for the revolutionary result of “email”. Although there were many cases where messages passed between different users within the same computer and created a great impression among the users, the real email we know started today with the first email on the net.

Ray Tomlinson was involved in a group developing a timesharing system called TENEX that ran on Digital PDP-10 computers, and was working on the Network Control Protocol for TENEX and CPYNET (Experimental File Transfer Program). While making improvements to SNDMSG, the local peer-to-peer mail program available at the time, Ray Tomlinson realized that he could easily embed CPYNET code into SNDMSG and transfer messages over a network connection to remote mailboxes, as well as attach messages to local mailbox files.

By incorporating the features of SNDMSG and CPYNET, he was able to develop a network email program and tested it on two machines literally side by side. He used the @ sign to distinguish between different machines in a very simple way, such as “from: me @ thismachine to: you @ thatmachine”. After testing the program several times by sending messages between the two computers, he sent a general message to his group explaining how to send messages over the network. And that’s how the first email network came about.