All about the ancient tribes
Ray Tomlinson is credited as the inventor of email; in 1971, he developed the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts across the ARPANET, using the @ sign to link the user name with a destination server. By the mid-1970s, this was the form recognized as email.
Electronic mail, or commonly referred to as email, since around 1993 has been the leading form of internet communication for the past two decades. But the first email was actually sent in the early 70s, which makes the medium quite ancient by modern standards of technology.
ARPANET mail Ray Tomlinson is generally credited as having sent the first email across a network, initiating the use of the “@” sign to separate the names of the user and the user’s machine in 1971, when he sent a message from one Digital Equipment Corporation DEC-10 computer to another DEC-10.
The ARPANET helped to evolved into what is known today as the internet. The first e-mail was sent three years later in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson. Ray Tomlinson eventually was the first to use the @ symbol in his emails to show which message was sent at which computer to show that it wasnt a local host.
For many years, the Internet was predominantly used by government groups and scientists, but in 1995, commercial Internet access started to be sold to consumers.
Prof Kirstein set up the Queen’s first official email account, HME2, and guided her through the process of sending her first message. Signed “Elizabeth R”, it announced the imminent arrival of a programming language developed within the Ministry of Defence.
The term email was first coined by VA Shiva Ayyadurai in 1978. Those five characters “E”, “M”, “A”, “I”, and “L” were juxtaposed together to name the main subroutine of the first email system.
That year, a computer programmer in Switzerland named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. Berners-Lee created the Internet that we know today.
This is why Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing email in 1972. Like many of the Internet inventors, Tomlinson worked for Bolt Beranek and Newman as an ARPANET contractor. He picked the @ symbol from the computer keyboard to denote sending messages from one computer to another.
1. The first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson to himself in 1971.
The very first version of what would become known as email was invented in 1965 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of the university’s Compatible Time-Sharing System, which allowed users to share files and messages on a central disk, logging in from remote terminals.