Insights on the evolution of the internet – The humble Electronic Mail (e-mail).
Something that most people are comfortable using is the humble email and we use it to send to family and friends and even have business addresses - nowadays we have free email for everyone and anyone could sign up for an online account. Actually it is the ‘killer app’ of the web and is so intrinsic and inborn to the internet and how everything is setup to work - not least of all the Client/Server architecture that we’ve inherited. We also forget how far we have come in terms of usability, adoption and just plain ease of use.
An ARPANET contractor Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing email in 1971 and he originally picked the @ symbol from the computer keyboard to denote sending messages from one computer to another.
We seem to have become accustomed with the @ sign and it seems like we’ve extended its use in social networking where by referring to people or alias/avatars linking using the @ sign - like @egodust to point to a recipient. Even Steemians are greeted with a @ before their handle. Email of sorts have been in existence from to late sixties, early seventies but were mainly used by large universities or research organizations like CERN where scientists and university staff used these services to communicate on research etc.
The videos show a snippet from a television documentary called Database which was on in 1984 and demonstrates how people were using their computers to send email – I was most amused by these videos and have memories of the very first email programs that I’ve used.
In 1998 Microsoft released Microsoft Mail pictured below.
Rererences
E-Mail Inventor , Microsoft Mail Image