"I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other... The test messages were entirely forgettable. . . . Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP or something similar." -Ray Tomlinson
In the 1960's, computer "timeshare" users could use
talk to communicate in realtime using text, but if a person
was not logged into the timeshare computer, you could not leave them a
message. Ray Tomlinson wrote SNDMSG to allow timeshare
users to leave messages for each other, but it only worked for users on
that particular computer. There was no way to communicate with users of
other computers. When the ARPAnet began to be deployed, it was a network
looking for a use. Tomlinson extended SNDMSG to enable it
to send messages across the fledgling ARPAnet and email as we know it was
born. Six months later, email was large majority of the traffic on the
ARPAnet.
"It soon became obvious that the ARPANET was becoming a human- communication medium with very important advantages over normal U.S. mail and over telephone calls. One of the advantages of the message systems over letter mail was that, in an ARPANET message, one could write tersely and type imperfectly, even to an older person in a superior position and even to a person one did not know very well, and the recipient took no offense. The formality and perfection that most people expect in a typed letter did not become associated with network messages, probably because the network was so much faster, so much more like the telephone." - J.C.R. Licklider,
I find the discovery of email to be quite interesting because all of the pieces were simple, separately developed and only moderately useful. But once they were put all together, it became almost something else entirely. It was the first killer app for the fledgling ARPANET, which until then had no real use.
The
Invention of Email
BBN's take on the
invention of email
How Email
Was Invented