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Who invented E-mail


chris

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This is just a tidbit. Not really a post, just some information. The person who originally invented e-mail did it for his computer company for sending messages from one computer to another. Then he linked them up for sending to another company. Patented the idea, and his company madea fortune selling it. Ironicly, Hes a multi-millionaire, but he still drives some beat up old car, and lives in a small house. Thats a real nerd. :)

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ARPAnet quickly became a forum for the exchange of information and ideas. The first major application developed for use on the ARPAnet was electronic mail. It was developed by Ray Tomlinson in 1972 and would allow those connected to the Internet to establish one-on-one communication with others at high speed.

 

The term "spam", when referencing E-mail, has its roots go back to 1970, when apparently, according to the SVMN (Silicon Valley Mercury News), a Monty Python skit used the term "spam" in the scene in which conversation

got drowned out by rowdy diners who sang about SPAMTM, the canned meat. Thereafter, "spam" became the metaphor for junk E-mail "drowning out" regular messages in in-boxes.

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no. the goverement didnt invent email. i still have the discover magazine with the article. and it says this guy did for his work. so :P . btw i wouldnt bang natalie portman. ;)

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  • 10 months later...
Originally posted by blike

The term "spam", when referencing E-mail, has its roots go back to 1970, when apparently, according to the SVMN (Silicon Valley Mercury News), a Monty Python skit used the term "spam" in the scene in which conversation

got drowned out by rowdy diners who sang about SPAMTM, the canned meat. Thereafter, "spam" became the metaphor for junk E-mail "drowning out" regular messages in in-boxes.

 

http://www.ironworks.com/comedy/python/spam.htm

 

Originally posted by chris

no not al gore. even though he fits all those quality's. WAIT

::recalls a gore speech::

'I practicly invented the internet'

 

Oh yea, must be. :(

 

Help! We're being attacked by urban myths!

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Originally posted by Radical Edward

or rather, we were attacked by urban myths many moons ago. what was it Gore said again?

 

It was about him being on a group that studied the possibility of expanding the internet to commercial as well as scientific or military uses. Something like that.

 

Just like the Bill Gates 640k quote (IN THE MID EIGHTIES, THAT WAS ALL YOU NEEDED. NOTE HE SAID 'all that anyone needs IS 640k' (or whatever) NOT WILL NEED, YOU IDIOTS.) it's been blown out of proportion by idiots. In fact, there wasn't any proportion to begin with.

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Guest SyntaXVB5

E-Mail, like mostly everything else that's big was created in a university... Not sure of the name though. All I know is it's the same one that experienced the first exchange of data packets.

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  • 2 months later...
Guest MonkeyBoy_Z

From ... "When Wizards Stay Up Late - The Origins of The Internet" ....

 

The first electronic-mail delivery engaging two machines was done one day in 1972 by a quiet engineer, Ray Tomlinson at BBN. Sometime earlier, Tomlinson had written a program fir Tenex, the BBN-grown operating system that, by now, was running on most of the ARPANET's PDP-10 machines. The mail program was written in two parts: To send messages, you'd use a program called SENDMSG; to receive mail, you'd use the other part called READMAIL. He hadn't actually intended for the program to be used on the ARPANET. Like other mailbox programs of the day, it was created for time-sharing systems and designed only to handle mail locally, within individual PDP-10's, not across them.

 

But Tomlinson, an inveterate experimenter, decided to take advantage of having two PDP-10 computers set up in the Cambridge office; in fact, they were the same machinges BBN was using to connect to the ARPANET. Weeks earlier, Tomlinson had written an experimental file-transfer protocol called CPYNET. Now he modified the program so that it could carry a mail message from one machine and drop it into a file on another. When he tried it, and sent mail though his mail hadn't actually gone out onto the open network, it was a breakthrough; now there was nothing holding e-mail back from crossing the wider Net. Although in technical terms Tomlinson's program was trivial, culturally it was revolutionary. "SENDMSG opened the door," said Dave Crocker, the younger brother of Steve Crocker and an e-mail pioneer. "It created the first interconnectivity, then everyone took it from there."

 

But how to get this invention to running out on the network? The answer lay in the file-transfer protocol. In July 1972, one evening at Tech Square at MIT, as Abhay Bhushan was writing the final specifications for the ARPANET file-transfer protocol, some-one suggested piggybacking Tomlinson's email programs onto the end product. Why not? If electronic messages could ride on CPYNET, they might just as well ride on the file-transfer protocol. Bhushan and others worked out some modifications. In August, when Jon Postel received an RFC outlining the e-mail feature, he thought to himself, "Now there's a nice hack." The ARPANET's first electronic mail-handling twins, named MAIL and MLFL, came to life.

 

Tomlinson became well known for SENDMSG and CPYNET. But he became better known for a brilliant (he called it obvious) decision he made while writing those programs. He needed a way to separate, in the e-mail address, the name of the user from the machine the user was on. How should that be denoted? He wanted a character that would not, under any conceivable circumstances, be found in a user's name. He looked down at the keyboard he was using, a Model 33 Teletype, which almost everyon else on the NEt used, too. In addition to the letters and numerals there were about a dozen punctuation marks. "I got there first, so I got to choose any punctuation I wanted," Tomlinson said. "I chose the @ sign." The character also had the advantage of meaning "at" the designated institution. He had no idea he was creating an icon for the wired world

 

So there you have it. Check it out at http://www.bbn.com if you like. Wow, what a first post. :D

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