• Question: When/how was the first email message sent?

    Asked by anon-200936 to Rosemary, Oliver, Leigh, Jordan, Hannah, David on 1 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: David Walker-Sünderhauf

      David Walker-Sünderhauf answered on 1 Mar 2019:

      I’m afraid I really don’t know about this – maybe someone else could help with the details? 🙂 I do think the internet itself was invented for exchanging knowledge between academics and universities, so the first email was probably sent for this purpose.

    • Photo: Jordan Kirby

      Jordan Kirby answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      Great Question! The first email (which became the emails we know and love today) was sent in 1971 by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson to another computer sitting beside him, across a network called ARPANET (which in itself is a really interesting topic but for now just think of it as the “Proto-Internet”).

      Sending his message across the network to another computer was done by utilizing the @ symbol to specify which user (The bit before the @ in an email) and what location it would go to (The bit after the @).

      While this might sound a bit anticlimactic for the “First ever email” this was a massive leap forward for computer sciences and formed the foundations to how emails work today.

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