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Email is such an important method of personal and business communications that there are spoken and unspoken email etiquette rules that people break all the time. While the technology has been part of daily life for decades now, it’s one of those modern technologies that are older than you think. The first email was sent in 1971 by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson, meaning email predates the World Wide Web by over 20 years.
Unfortunately for those who are hoping the first email is something memorable or deep like Neil Armstrong’s legendary “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” Tomlinson’s first test message, sent to another computer in the same room, was complete nonsense. As he told The Verge, “The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them,” saying they were likely something along the lines of “QWERTYIOP.”
The message being a keyboard smash, or Tomlinson simply pressing the first line of letter keys, makes more sense when you learn that email was a personal project of his rather than a work assignment. At the time, Tomlinson worked for BBN Technologies, which the U.S. Department of Defense hired to work on ARPANET, the precursor to the modern-day internet. Tomlinson developed email as a way to see if two computers could send messages to one another, successfully creating a program called SNDMSG.
Internet has been around longer than you realized
While most think about the internet as a massive network that connects everyone to people across the world, the technology started out as something else. ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was developed as a way for researchers to securely send communications and information to one another. The first ARPANET signal was sent on Oct. 29, 1969, not long before Tomlinson’s first email. Though it definitely wasn’t the internet of today, ARPANET is a visionary technology from the ’60s that predicted the future.
Similarly, email made computers more useful, resulting in further adoption of the tech. Though Tomlinson did not come up with the term email, he made some other important contributions that we still use to this day. One is the @ symbol used to distinguish the sender from the host in email addresses. He also helped develop the standard header information format everyone still uses.
Email remains a great tool for communication even after the introduction of faster communication methods like text messages. That said, many bad actors use email for nefarious purposes, so it’s important to be vigilant. Some are frighteningly convincing, but there are typically clear signs an email is a scam. Another smart practice is creating a burner email account to keep your personal inbox clear.
