[Photo credit: Khwanchai Phanthong/Pexels]
Ray Tomlinson, the developer of electronic mail (email) who passed away in 2016, didn’t recall the contents of that historic first “network email” message in late 1971. They evidently weren’t meaningful.
“The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them,” he said.
The notion of sending messages to people through a computer wasn’t new in the early 1970s. The idea had existed for at least the previous decade. Tomlinson was the person who bridged two programs, one that was able to transmit “mail” to other users of the same computer and the other that enabled data transfer from one computer to another through the ARPANET network, a precursor to the internet.
Tomlinson’s first group e-mail explained the new program to users. He reminded them that, to send something successfully, a user must include the “@” symbol between the username and the computer name. He chose it for two reasons: it wasn’t likely to be in a username and it signified “at.”
He initially wanted to keep the innovation private. After his initial demonstration of the new program, one of his colleagues recalled him saying, “Don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on.”
The initial “spam” message followed in 1978 when marketer Gary Thuerk asked an assistant to enter the addresses of 600 people, inviting them to see a new line of computers during a trip to the West Coast of the US. Theurk was on to something: In 2025, an estimated 45 percent of global e-mail traffic consisted of spam.
According to Feinler and Vittal, the inaugural commercial webmail service was launched in 1995.
Tomlinson’s pursuit of the new means of communications was rather casual. He invented e-mail “mostly because it seemed like a neat idea,” he said. “There was no directive to ‘go forth and invent email.’”
E-mail overtook postal mail in 1996 in usage, and, by 2015, two billion e-mail messages were sent daily. Tomlinson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012 and was honored for “having brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate.”
Tomlinson also breathed new life into the “@” symbol. American Underwood typewriters first used it in 1884 to depict an “at the rate of” price designation. After he integrated it into email addresses, the sign took on international significance. It was called a snail in France and Italy, while the symbol became known as “the meow sign” in Finland because its shape resembled a curled-up cat.
The transformational effect of his work wasn’t entirely clear to him years ago. “I’m often asked, did I know what I was doing? And the answer is, yes, I knew exactly what I was doing,” he said. “I just had no notion whatsoever of what the ultimate impact would be,” Tomlinson said.
Never mind the specifics of that first email in 1971. What will long be remembered is how he changed life.
References:
Feinler, E., & Vittal, J. (2022, July 1). Email innovation timeline. Computer History Museum.
Grimes, W. (2016, March 7). Raymond Tomlinson, who put the @ sign in email, is dead at 74. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/technology/raymond-tomlinson-email-obituary.html
Hutchinson, A. (2009). Big ideas. Hearst Books.
