The First Email Was Sent in 1971

The advent of electronic mail predates the internet as we know it, originating from a project called ARPANET, a computer network established by the U.S. Department of Defense. In the 1960s, users could send messages to others on the same time-sharing computer, but not between different machines. This changed in 1971 thanks to Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at the research company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). Tomlinson was working on a program called SNDMSG for sending messages and another called CPYNET for transferring files between computers. He had the innovative idea to combine the code from these two programs, which for the first time allowed a message to be sent from one computer to another over a network.

This breakthrough happened in a surprisingly low-key manner, with the first-ever network email being sent between two DEC PDP-10 computers that were sitting right next to each other. The content of this historic message was admittedly trivial, with Tomlinson himself recalling it was something like "QWERTYUIOP". Perhaps more significant than the message itself was Tomlinson's decision to use the "@" symbol to separate the user's name from the name of their host computer. He chose it simply because it was an underused character on the keyboard and it logically separated the "user" at a specific "host". This simple choice created the standard for email addresses that has remained in use for over half a century.

Initially, Tomlinson didn't grasp the full importance of his creation, viewing it merely as a "neat idea". However, the utility of being able to leave messages for people on other computers quickly became apparent. Within a couple of years, a study found that 75 percent of all traffic on ARPANET was email, demonstrating its rapid adoption by the network's academic and government users. This new form of communication laid the groundwork for a fundamental shift in how people would interact, long before personal computers and the internet became household items.