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Email History
- Dave Crocker,
worked on MS, MMDF and RFC
822.
It
soon became obvious that the ARPANET was becoming a human- communication
medium with very
important advantages over normal U.S. mail and over telephone calls. One
of the advantages of the message systems over letter mail was that, in an ARPANET
message, one could write tersely and type imperfectly, even to an older person
in a superior position and even to a person one did not know very well, and
the
recipient took no offense. The formality and perfection that most people expect
in a typed letter did not become associated with network messages, probably
because
the network was so much faster, so much more like the telephone.
- J.C.R.
Licklider, Albert Vezza, Applications of Information Networks,
Proc of the IEEE, 66(11), Nov 1978. |
Who invented email? Electronic mail is a natural and perhaps inevitable use
of networked communication technology that developed along with the evolution
of the Internet.
Indeed, message exchange in one form or another has existed from the early
days of timesharing
computers.
Network capable email was developed for the ARPANET shortly
after it's creation, and has now evolved into the powerful email technology
that is
the most
widely used
application on the Internet today.
Key events and milestones in the invention of email are described below:
- Timesharing computers. With the development in the early 1960's
of timesharing computers that could run more than one program at once, many
research
organizations wrote programs to exchange text messages and
even real-time chat among users at different
terminals. As is often the case,
more than one person at the same time noticed that it was a natural use of a
new
technology
to extend human
communications. However,
these early
systems
were limited
to
use by the group of people
using one computer.
- SNDMSG & READMAIL. In the early
1970's, Ray
Tomlinson was working on a small team developing the TENEX operating system,
with
local
email
programs
called
SNDMSG
and READMAIL.
In late 1971, Tomlinson created
the
first
ARPANET email
application
when he updated SNDMSG by adding a program called CPYNET capable of copying
files
over
the
network, and informed his colleagues by sending them an email using the new program
with
instructions
on how to use it.
To
extend
the
addressing
to
the
network,
Tomlinson chose
the "commercial at" symbol
to combine the user and host names, providing the naturally meaningful notation
"user@host" that is the standard for email addressing today.
These early programs
had
simple functionality and were command line driven, but established the basic
transactional model that still defines the technology -- email
gets
sent to someone's mailbox.
- MAIL & MLFL. In 1972, the commands MAIL and MLFL were
added to the FTP program
(RFC
385) to provide standard network transport capabilities for email
transmission. FTP sent a separate copy of each email to each recipient,
and provided the standard
ARPANET email functionality until the early 1980's when the more efficient SMTP protocol
was created. Among other improvements,
SMTP enabled sending a single message to a domain with more than one
addressee, after which the local server would locally copy the message
to each recipient.
- RD. The Director of ARPA, Steve Lukasik, asked Lawrence
Roberts, then the director of the IPTO,
to improve on READMAIL, which required messages to be read in order, and with
no
ability to save or reply. Roberts wrote RD in one three-day weekend as a collection
of
macros in the Tenex text editor TECO (Text Editor and COrrector), and called
the program called RD.
The new program included capabilities to sort email
headers
by
subject
and date, giving users the
ability to order the messages in their Inbox, and to read, save, and delete
messages in the order they wished. In a sign of the pragmatism associated with
much of the email development over the years, RD was developed not
as a research effort, but as a practical effort to solve a real-world problem
of email management.
- NRD. The DARPA
researcher Barry Wessler improved on RD, and called the new program NRD, including
several new usability features.
- WRD /
BANANARD.
Marty Yonke recoded SNDMSG and NRD into an independent program called WRD.
This was the first program to integrate reading, sending,
and a user-friendly help system in the same application, and was later renamed
BANANARD.
- MSG. John Vittal improved
on BANANARD and called the new program MSG, with powerful features like message
forwarding, a
configurable interface, and an Answer command that automatically created properly
addressed replies. MSG can fairly be called the first modern email program.
Dave Crocker
(see MS below) feels the Answer command was revolutionary: "My
subjective sense was that propagation of MSG resulted in an exponential explosion
of email use, over roughly a 6-month period. The
simplistic explanation is that people could now close the
Shannon-Weaver communication loop with a single, simple command, rather than
having to formulate each new message. In other words, email moved from the
sending of independent messages into having a conversation."
- MS / MH. In 1975, the DARPA program manager Steve
Walker initiated a project at RAND to
develop an MSG-like email capability for the Unix operating
system. The project was undertaken by Dave Farber, professor at the University
of California at Irvine. Dave Crocker, starting graduate school at the University
of
Southern California's Annenberg School, designed the functional specifications,
and Steve Tepper and Bill Crosby did the programming.
The resulting system
supported multiple user interfaces, from the basic Unix
email command to the MSG interface, and was called MS. Crocker comments: "The
program was very powerful, and very, very slow." A follow-on project
at RAND rebuilt the program to take more advantage of the Unix system environment,
breaking the commands out into individual programs that ran in individual
Unix shells. Bruce Borden did most of the programming, and named the resulting
application MH as
an abbreviation of Mail Handler. Since 1982, Marshall Rose and others have
upgraded and maintained MH, and it has become the standard email
application for the Unix environment.
- RFC 733 & RFC 822. In 1977, Crocker, John Vittal, Kenneth Pogran,
and D. Austin Henderson collaborated on a DARPA initiative to collect various
email
data formats into a single, coherent specification, resulting in RFC
733.
The specification combined existing documentation with a bit of
innovation, and was the first RFC explicitly
declared an Internet standard in order to try and bring some order to the
various email formats in use across the ARPANET -- an effort not initially
greeted
with
universal approval among the independent, distributed research community.
In 1982, Crocker revised RFC 733 to produce RFC
822, which was the first standard to describe the syntax of domain
names.
- MMDF. In 1978, Crocker followed Dave Farber
to the University of Delaware, where they took on a project for the U.S.
Army Materiel Command (AMC) to develop a capability to relay email over
dial-up telephone lines for sites that couldn't connect directly to the
ARPANET. Crocker created the first version of what would become the Multi-purpose
Memo Distribution Facility (MMDF) in six months of work, and then set up
and operated an experimental relay site at the University of Delaware for
various AMC
sites.
The MMDF
link-level protocol was developed by Ed Szurkowski. Several others
worked on the software after Crocker left, including Doug Kingston, Craig
Partridge, and Steve Kille, developing enhancement such as creation
of a robust
TCP/IP layer. Kille adapted
the software to support the ISO/CCITT OSI X.400 email standard, one of the
first systems to do so,
naming the software "PP" after "Postman Pat", British vernacular
for the local postal delivery person. MMDF was also deployed to provide
the initial email relay capability for the CSNET.
- Sendmail. In the early 1980's, email relaying was also being performed
using
the simple UUCP technology
at the University of California at Berkeley, where the BSD
Unix operating system was developed. Eric Allman later created a program
called delivermail to cobble together multiple email transport services, creating,
in
effect,
a switch
rather than an integrated email store-and-forward capability. Allman then built
on this
experience to create the sendmail program,
which was distributed with BSD Unix, and has gone on to become the the most commonly
used SMTP server on the Internet.
- Commercial
Email. In 1988, Vinton Cerf arranged
for the connection of MCI Mail to the NSFNET through
the Corporation for the National Research
Initiative (CNRI)
for "experimental use", providing the first sanctioned commercial use
of the Internet. Shortly thereafter, in 1989, the Compuserve mail system also
connected
to the NSFNET, through the Ohio State
University network.
- Online Services. In 1993, the
large network service providers America Online and Delphi started to connect their
proprietary email systems to the Internet, beginning the large scale adoption
of Internet email as a global standard.
Resources. The following resources provide additional information about the history of email:
- A list of early email systems
on the ARPANET can be found in Appendix A of RFC
808.
- Claims by Shiva Ayyadurai to have invented email.
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