The First Email Was Sent in 1971

The creation of network (Review) email was less a formal assignment and more a side project for a curious engineer. In the early 1970s, digital messages were limited to users on the same time-sharing computer. The network that connected many of these machines, the ARPANET, was a U.S. government-funded project designed to link research institutions. It was on this pioneering network that Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at the research company Bolt, Beranek and Newman, saw a new possibility. He envisioned a way for users on different, connected computers to send messages directly to one another.

To make this happen, Tomlinson ingeniously combined two existing software tools. He adapted a program for sending messages to local users, called SNDMSG, with a file transfer protocol he had developed called CPYNET. This fusion allowed a message to be sent from one machine and dropped into a user's mailbox on another. For the address, he needed a character to cleanly separate the user's name from the name of their host computer. Looking down at his Teletype keyboard, he chose the "@" symbol, logically signifying that the user was "at" a specific machine.

This simple choice created the email address standard we still use today. The first message was sent between two computers sitting right next to each other, with Tomlinson later recalling the content was a trivial, forgettable string of characters like "QWERTYUIOP". He didn't immediately grasp the significance of his creation, viewing it simply as a "neat thing to do." Despite these humble beginnings, email quickly became the most popular application on the ARPANET, demonstrating a fundamental human desire for convenient, long-distance communication and forever changing how we connect.