Think of the dozens of emails that land in your inbox every day. All of them have an ancestor, and that ancestor was a test message an engineer sent to himself, one nobody thought worth keeping. Even he can't remember what it said.
A side project at BBN
In 1971 Ray Tomlinson was working at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. BBN was one of the firms that built the building blocks of ARPANET, the network backed by the US Department of Defense. According to the Internet Hall of Fame, DEC PDP-10 computers were usually at the ends of these connections, and Tomlinson was working on the TENEX operating system developed for those machines.
At that time people using the same computer could leave messages for one another. There was a program called SNDMSG for that. But the messages stayed inside that one machine. Tomlinson's idea was simple: combine SNDMSG with the code of CPYNET, a program that copied files over the network. That way a message could leave one computer and reach a mailbox on another computer over the network.
This wasn't even an official assignment. Tomlinson himself described the invention as a small side job for a long time. The Centre for Computing History reports that around then he was also working on a reading program called READMAIL alongside SNDMSG and CPYNET. So reading was thought of as much as sending.
Two machines side by side
The sweetest detail of the first test is the distance. In Tomlinson's own account, the first message was sent between two machines that were "literally side by side". So the message traveled through ARPANET and arrived at a computer a few steps away.
So what did it say? Tomlinson said these test messages were "entirely forgettable". By his guess, the first message was most likely "QWERTYUIOP" or something similar, that is, the letters of the keyboard's top row. Wikipedia also notes that this phrase is often misquoted. In short, the text of the first email wasn't recorded and isn't known for certain.
There is a similar uncertainty about the date itself. Sources place the event in 1971, but there is no agreement on an exact day or month.
Why was the @ sign chosen?
Even if the content of the message was forgotten, the most lasting mark Tomlinson left is elsewhere: the @ sign. To send a message across the network, you needed to separate the user's name from the computer they were on.
According to Tomlinson, the @ sign wasn't used in usernames, so it wouldn't cause confusion. And its meaning fit too: the user wasn't local but on another machine, that is, "there" (at). In a comment to the Internet Hall of Fame he called @ "the only preposition on the keyboard". Every address in the form user@domain today is the legacy of this decision.
It looks like a small decision, but its consequences were huge. Until then the @ sign was an ordinary symbol used mostly in commercial documents to show unit price. With Tomlinson's choice it became the symbol of digital identity, and later even settled at the start of usernames on social media.
| Then (1971) | Now |
|---|---|
| Two computers side by side | Devices all over the world |
| A test message whose content was forgotten | Attachments, images, signatures |
| A handful of ARPANET users | Billions of email accounts |
A modest inventor
The interesting thing is that email wasn't planned as a "product". There was no market research, no launch, no company strategy. An engineer thought it would be practical to combine two programs he had, and tried it. One of the internet's most durable tools was born like that, almost on its own.
Tomlinson didn't see his invention as a big deal for many years. Born on April 23, 1941 in Amsterdam, New York, Tomlinson nevertheless received many awards later: the IEEE Internet Award with Dave Crocker in 2004, the Prince of Asturias Award with Martin Cooper in 2009, and induction into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012. He died on March 5, 2016 at the age of 74.
Another interesting connection: in the same years Tomlinson is also known as the person who wrote Reaper to delete Creeper, the first worm program roaming ARPANET. So the inventor of email also played a part in the story of the first "antivirus".
The content of the first email was forgotten, but the @ sign settled right in the middle of our lives; do you think what lasts in technology is the message, or the idea that carries it?