Happy Birthday Email
Did you know that email is 30 this year? Time for a mid-life crisis? David Dorn thinks it might be!
The first message sent in Morse Code on May 24, 1844 was, 'What hath God wrought.'
The first message sent over Graham Bell's telephone on March 10, 1876 was, 'Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.'
The first words to a phonograph in 1877, by Thomas Edison were, 'Mary had a little lamb.'
The first words said from the moon in 1969 were, 'Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.'
For all of those events, we have the dates, times, first words, and possibly even what the loquacious person was wearing all on file, well documented, and there to be looked up forever.
The same, though, cannot be said for Email. To the best of our knowledge, the first email was sent by an American by the name of Ray Tomlinson, an engineer who was tasked with the job of creating a method of messaging on a single machine (multi-user, of course), eventually called SNDMSG (say it out loud - 'SeNDMeSsaGe'). Not that SNDMSG was what you'd call email, really. More like a sticky note!
According to my research, he hit on the bright idea of using SNDMSG across a network to another machine, indicating to his software that the recipient wasn't on the local machine by adding an '@' sign and the name of the other machine.
Thus was the first ever email address formed.
It seems that Tomlinson remembers sending an 'email' to himself, from one machine to the other, but he can't remember what it said, or when he did it. As best we can narrow it down (and in best press release speak) it was third quarter 1971, and probably had a content of 'QWERTYUIOP', all in upper case!
So, the father of email started off with a bad habit - shouting in email!
Since then, of course, things have grown apace. I well remember using linked bulleting board systems to shuffle email around before the Internet as we know it today was born - before AOL was born, even! None of your immediate delivery, either. It took a couple of days for an email to get where it was going, and another couple of days after that to get a reply.
These days, using IMs, we can get a message through quicker than you can type it and emails get through in mere seconds.
The trouble is, emails are bloated now. All this HTML capability, attachments, fonts, colours, embedded images, wallpaper... to this somewhat ancient geek, there's quite often loads of wrapping, but not a lot of sweetness in what I receive.
But still, with the speeds we connect at these days, such fripperies become less of an encumbrance. In my early days, you see, we connected at a humble 300 bits per second, or, even worse, we had 75 bits per second upload speed, and 1200 bits per second download speed. Sending an email at those speeds was not a quick experience.
So, we kept them simple - plain text, nothing else. And given that often, we paid by the character to get them delivered, you kept to the point, as well. Actually, now I come to think of it, email then was a lot like texting on a mobile phone today.
Now, I wonder where texting will be in thirty years' time?
