Who created the email? Understand the history of this technology

The electronic mail service continues to be used as a digital identity, a prerequisite for registrations and a formal or official way of contacting someone. However, there are many elements and curiosities in his trajectory that helped shape the applications that exist today.

Next, explore the origin of email, the characters behind the creation of the system and try to understand how a simple proposed tool became something central to the daily life of a connected society.

The precursor system of email

The history of email begins before the internet, because connecting computers to each other is an old desire for the industry. This will create a more direct and efficient communication platform between these machines.

The embryo of this exchange of messages Born in 1965 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was a project developed on a Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS), an operating system for users to share resources on the same machine.

This prototype involved a person writing a message to another user of the same computerwith the recipient only checking the message when logging into the terminal. It was called Mail, because it was a type of letter, and this private space was the Mailbox, or “mail box” in Portuguese translation, later renamed as inbox.

Ray Tomlinson and the creation of the system

In 1969 the ARPANET the United States Department of Defense network and main precursor to the internet. It connected different machines from military, research centers and universities.

It is at this point that Ray Tomlinson appears, who worked there and in 1971 made modifications to the SNDMSG system (a reduction of send messageor “send message”), which was similar to Mail, and in CPYNET, which attached and sent files.

Ray then created a way to send messages over a network from one computer to another and the destination addresses in the format that we still use todaywith the user’s login and an identification of the terminal or server — as if it were the destination address of a letter. At this point, email technology as we know it today was born.

A controversy over authorship

Although Tomlinson is recognized as the creator of the idea, the rights to create the email are contested by one person. Indian immigrant Shiva Ayyadurai claims he wrote the “real email” in 1978while studying at the University of New Jersey.

Shiva claims that it was the first system that emulated the messaging system in an office, all via local networks. He also would be responsible for the term email and denounces that ARPANET “kidnapped” famebecause the group dominated computer science at the time.

But the story is now contested: the programmer actually only created a specific email system, nothing pioneering in electronic mail. Unsuccessful in the lawsuits, he tried for years to prove his side of the story from a personal website.

How did the @ symbol appear in messages?

Although today it is only related to the digital world to identify user accounts on social networks and the email server, the at sign or “@” symbol is very old.

The most accepted theory today is that it emerged in medieval Europe as an abbreviation of terms used by copyist monks and, over time, traders began to use it to indicate prices and quantities. This symbol was adopted on typewriters and also migrated to computer keyboards.

When designing the first email service, Tomlinson needed a character to separate the user name from the server receiving messages — and chose precisely the “@”, which was unusual enough to differentiate the two halves of the address, but at the same time intuitive to use.

How has email evolved over the years?

New developments appear in the years following the arrival of technology. They include email folders for organizing one’s email and a way to catalog messages, helping to organize one’s inbox.

At the end of the 1970s, several email clients for Unix and using FTP appeared. In 1982, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was born, the email transmission standard most used to send messages to a server. For sending personal messages, the first standards were the Post Office Protocol (POP) from 1984 and the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), two years later.

The emergence of Hotmail and Yahoo Mail

Up until this point, email was a revolutionary but less accessible form of communication. The computer arrived in homes in the 1980s and the internet expanded at that time with the expansion of the TCP/IP protocol and commercial connections.

Providers already maintained email servers, but independent web clients came during this period of transformation. Rocket Mail was one of the first: it came out in 1996 and was bought the following year by Yahoo! and became popular Yahoo Mail. Another pioneer was Hotmailfrom the same year, and which was also acquired by Microsoft.

Over time, other technology giants launched email terminations — Microsoft itself took an important step with Outlook Express, a now discontinued email and news client. Indeed, Outlook today is the name of the company’s unified emailsbut the Hotmail brand became so well known that it took a while for it to be retired.

Email in the Brazilian scenario

In Brazil, The email arrives closely linked to dial-up internet providerswhich provided systems for direct connection to the telephone line using software, the dialer.

For this reason, the country had several emails with “@s” that became classics, with old providers including ZipMail, BOL, ZAZ, Terra, UOL, iG, POP and several others. Over time, however, this variety was reduced and limited to the most popular.

Arrival of Gmail and current services

In 2004, Google announced o Gmail the search engine’s company’s electronic mail system. He was born full of potential, because he had 1 GB of storage for files, messages and attachments — an absurd space compared to the 4 MB of rival Yahoo!. Interestingly, the service was revealed on April 1st and many people found the news suspicious.

In the last two decades, email has ceased to be an alternative for local providers and has become concentrated in consolidated companies. Alternatives are more niche, as in the case of cybersecurity and its digital protection features against scams such as phishing like Proton Mail.

Furthermore, features such as search have replaced folders and attachment limits have become increasingly generous. In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), tools like Gemini and Copilot embedded in these platforms summarize messages and even help with composing responses.

Nowadays, There are those who no longer use email daily, or only log in to confirm registrations on other services: communication via social networks and messengers such as WhatsApp is considered more immediate and intuitive. However, it remains important, with special attention to corporate and academic circles, in addition to the association with services such as Google Drive and OneDrive.

In recent years, email has also helped to revive content that fits well with the fast-paced routine of modernity: newsletterswhich summarize or bring materials from a wide range of topics directly to your inbox and with specific curation or authorship.

Biggest curiosities about email

• The first spam came in 71 and was the message “There is no way to peace, peace is the way”, making room for chains and other unwanted messages sent in the following decades;
• May 1978 was marked by the emergence of mass spam, that is, spam sent to several networks at the same time. Email lists already existed and a user sent an invitation to all contacts for a presentation of computer productsalready with negative responses from angry users;
• In 1991, the first email from space was sentfrom a Macintosh Portable controlled by astronauts Shannon Lucid and James Adamson.
• THE IBM Simon launched in 1993 and considered the first smartphone on the market, already had access to email. However, the device full of potential had several limitations and was not commercially successful.
• The romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail”, or You’ve got Mailfrom 1998, was recognized for bringing electronic mail as a key element of the plot. The original title expression is AOL’s trademark when a message arrived.

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