First Email Message
Ray Tomlinson has been referred to as the father of e-mail because, back in 1971, he invented the software that permitted messages to be transmitted between computers. Ray made it feasible to trade messages between machines in various locations; between universities, across continents, and oceans.
MIT first exhibited the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961. It permitted multiple users to log into the IBM 7094 from distant dial-up terminals, and to store files online on disk. This revolutionary ability prompted users to share information in new ways. E-mail began in 1965 as a means for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Though the precise history is murky, two of the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS. E-mail was rapidly broadened to become network e-mail, permitting users to send messages between different computers by 1966 or earlier.
The ARPANET computer network made a huge contribution to the evolution of e-mail. There is one study that suggests experimental inter-system e-mail transfers started soon after its creation in 1969. Ray Tomlinson pioneered the use of the @ sign to differentiate the names of the user and their machine and significantly enhanced the popularity of e-mail.
Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, New York, but his family soon moved to the small, unincorporated village of Vail Mills, New York. He went to the Broadalbin Central School in nearby Broadalbin, New York. He attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York where he took part in the co-op program with IBM. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer in 1963. After graduating from RPI, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to continue his electrical engineering education. At MIT, Tomlinson worked in the Speech Communication Group and produced an analog-digital hybrid speech synthesizer as the theme of his Master's thesis. He obtained a S.M. in Electrical Engineering degree in 1965.
In 1967 he joined the technology company of Bolt Beranek and Newman where he helped formulate the TENEX operating system including ARPANET Network Control Protocol and TELNET implementations. He composed a file-transfer program called CPYNET to transfer files through the ARPANET. Tomlinson was assigned to modify a program called SNDMSG, which sent messages to other users of a time-sharing computer, to run on TENEX. He added code he acquired from CPYNET to SNDMSG so messages could be transmitted to users on other computers — the first email.
After a couple of test messages (containing the timeless phrases "QUERTYIOP" and possibly "ASDFGHJK"), Ray Tomlinson was satisfied enough with his innovation to show it off to the rest of the group. He sent a message to colleagues advising them of the new feature, with directions for placing an @ in between the user's login name and the name of his host computer. "The first use of network mail," says Tomlinson, "announced its own existence." Tomlinson's new program almost instantaneously became the first killer app. Two years later, a study found that 75 percent of all traffic on ARPANET was email.
Historically, a variety of email system innovations developed that were frequently incompatible or not interoperable. With the proliferation of the Internet since the early 1980s, however, the standardization campaigns of Internet architects came through in proclaiming a single standard based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet Standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982.
Modern e-mail systems on the High Speed Internet are supported on a store-and-forward framework in which e-mail computer server systems, accept, forward, or store messages on behalf of users, who only connect to the e-mail infrastructure with their PC or other network-enabled device for the length of message transmission or retrieval to or from their specified server. Seldom is email transferred directly from one user's device to another's. Although, in the beginning, email consisted only of text messages composed in the ASCII character set, nearly any media format can be transmitted today, including attachments of audio and video clips.
Tomlinson continues to work at BBN today and has received numerous awards for his contributions. In 2000 he accepted the George R. Stibitz Computer Pioneer Award from the American Computer Museum. In 2001 he received a Webby Award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences for lifetime achievement. Also in 2001 he was inducted into the Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame. In 2002 Discover Magazine presented him its Innovation Award. In 2004, he received the IEEE Internet Award along with Dave Crocker.