Blog #7 - EOTO Technology

 The First Ever Email

A lot of people gave presentations, but the one that stuck out to me the most was the first-ever email was

sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971. Tomlinson, an engineer and computer scientist, worked at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN), a company contracted by the U.S. Department of Defense to develop ARPANET, a precursor to the modern internet. Tomlinson’s breakthrough came as part of his involvement in this early networking project, which was designed to allow multiple computers to share information over long distances. He would be and continues to be recognized as the father of the email.

In a world where communication had been done over giant computers with heavy limitations on what you could actually do, until Tomlinson's discoveries. Before Tomlinson's innovation, users could only send messages on the same computer, so the challenge was connecting users from different computers with ARPANET. At that time, Tomlinson was working on two separate programs, called CYPNET, which enabled file transfers between computers, and SNDMSG. He thought to combine the two after realizing this could make the messages transferable just as files. He modified the SNDMSG program to send messages from one computer to another using ARPANET. This is where the well-known @ symbol which separated the user from the device and came about since his system required a way to identify a specific user and/or computer combination.  This simple but effective solution allowed messages to be routed to the correct recipient on a different machine.

According to Tomlinson, it was a string of random characters, such as “QWERTY” or something similar, sent between two machines sitting next to each other. This would be the first ever email and although a bit dull it would mark the birth of a new form of communication that would revolutionize how people interact globally. 

Although people weren't too keen on his innovation at the time, it would be a game changer for all of history. The newfound ability to be able to communicate with people live, all while from the comfort of your own computers. He may not have realized what the long-term impact of his invention would be at the time, but his contribution would become one of the most important milestones in the development of the internet.