The Computer Corner
By Charles Miller (July 14, 2006)

Posterity in the trash folder

A few weeks ago, I wrote that the first-ever email was sent by the inventor Samuel Morse in 1844. Okay, so perhaps a message sent in Morse code over a telegraph is not everyone’s definition of an email, but it was electronic and a message. An Atención reader took me to task over that, and so this week I am going to delve further into the history behind email.

For today’s history lesson, we will agree to define the first-ever email as being an electronic message sent between two computers not wired directly to one another.
I am sure the reason I credited Morse with the first email is that his was a pivotal moment in communications history. When Morse tapped out “What hath God wrought?” it was with the certain knowledge he was changing the world and those words would be immortalized.

Given that computer-based email has now had a revolutionary effect on the way millions of people communicate, it would be nice if the first computer email had been similarly memorable. The truth is, the first email message between two computers was even more haphazard than Alexander Graham Bell’s first accidental telephone call: “Watson! Come here. I want you!”
The individual who sent the first-ever email between two computers was an electronics engineer named Ray Tomlinson. He was employed by Bolt Beranek & Newman, a company contracted in the 1960s by the US Defense Department to build a communications system capable of surviving a nuclear war. The ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) project eventually evolved into the internet we know today.

In truth, email was more a product of evolution than a single creation. Tomlinson took a program he was working on called SNDMSG, which could be used to save messages to different users in electronic mailboxes on one computer, and added the ability to transfer files between two different computers.

Unlike the historic communications moments recorded by his inventor predecessors Morse and Bell, Tomlinson’s first email went unheralded. He recalls the event occurring sometime in 1971, but the exact date, and even the contents of the first message, are lost to history.

Tomlinson today says the first message might have read “QWERTYUIOP,” explaining, “I think I may have just dragged my fingers across the keyboard.”

Tomlinson made a decision that changed communications history when he decided how to structure the format of identifying addresses. The now ubiquitous “@” symbol was chosen because it is the only preposition on the keyboard. He says he gave this far-reaching decision only “30 to 40 seconds of thought.”

Some keyboard layouts of the day omitted the “@” sign. It is interesting to speculate on the possibility the “at sign” might have disappeared from keyboards had it not been for the invention of email.

On the subject of disappearing characters, it is now becoming more accepted to write “e-mail” without the hyphen. Email is a “nonce word,” a combination of existing words, instantly comprehensible. Such new terms formed from two words in English are often hyphenated in the beginning, but over time, the hyphen fades from common usage. Many words in our language trace their etymology to such beginnings. Familiar words such as bath-room, day-care, soft-ware, and e-mail are written to-day without the hyphen.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-153-8528 or email FAQ@SMAguru.com.