The history of Email

With the inception of the Internet, email was a side benefit that was evolved along side it. In its early days the Internet was live connections between computers that allowed live transfer of data. A computer file was created and saved on one computer, and could be sent (uploaded) to another. Likewise with the proper connections, files could be retrieved (downloaded) the same way.

The staggering benefits of moving information across vast distances with this new medium motivated the early pioneers in this field to create computer applications that resided on a computer which could automate this process.

In 1970, Ray Tomlinson, a US research scientist developing a time-sharing system called Tenex, that ran on Digital PDP-10 computers. In 1971 he sent the worlds first email.

The rest developed extremely rapidly into the Internet and email applications. But the sole motivation was by the urgency President Eisenhower felt in response to the Russian launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957. President Eisenhower delegated to head research and development of technology to protect the US against possible technological weaponry advances the Russians were obviously exploiting.

The ARPANET was the first wide area packet switching network ever, and evolved into Internet. Joseph Carl Robnett "Lick" Licklider developed the idea of a network that could be linked universally across the globe. In 1962 ARPANet hired Licklider to be the director of “Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). This was in direct response to national security and defense against the growing Russian Space program.

This research was to help hasten the development of “Semi-Automatic Ground Environment or SAGE, established in 1954 by the US Air Force. The driving force that spurned the phenomenal growth of the first wide area network was to integrate this branch of the military with state of the art communications and put the US ahead in the arms race.

IBM and MIT jointly created the first “super computer”, the IBM AN/FSQ-7 to process the tasks that SAGE centers would execute. The resulting computer was the largest computer ever built, and weighed 250 tons. This monster took 27,000 square feet of space. In this day and age, it had 50,000 vacuum tubes and over 150 CRT monitors. In all it took two stories of an office building to house the complete system. The vacuum tubes made so much heat you couldn't stand close to the computer for more than a few seconds. The US Air Force bought twenty-seven of these monoliths.

The progress of this system and the leaders of it changed hands many times; as these pioneers left to go to work for the major innovators of the web we have today like IBM. But the significance is that very early on email was at the root of the inception of the Internet.

The problem was how to share data electronically, linked by only wires, over great distances. This one achievement back in 1971 shaped the course of history and brought about the huge steps in technology we call commonplace today.