Ray Tomlinson - inventor of email, which connected users in 1971 remote computers Arpanet networks.

Email is considered the most popular Internet service. Some people have access to the Internet, but only use email, not paying attention to other opportunities of the World Wide Web. And at the same time, it is difficult to find a person who deals with the network, but has never used the means of sending letters.

In 2001, the world celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the first email. A special congratulation was prepared by the authorities of Germany, where, from the beginning of the anniversary year, they stopped accepting international telegrams from the population for forwarding. In 1990, more than one and a half million international telegrams were sent through Deutsche Telekom channels, and in 2000 - only 70 thousand. The telegraph, the father of the telephone and the grandfather of the Internet, has become unprofitable. It was first supplanted by the telefax, and e-mail seems to have made it a thing of history.

Using the example of the development of e-mail, it is good to study the history of the development of science in the twentieth century. Back in 1968, the United States began developing a military computer network called Arpanet. The name was made up of the abbreviation ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) and the word Net, that is, network. A year later, the first four nodes were operational - at the universities of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Salt Lake City and the Stanford Institute. A computer at that time was a very expensive piece of equipment, so each one had several dozen users. And quite soon after the start of Arpanet, a small program became widespread that allowed everyone working on the same machine to write messages addressed to other users of this computer in one text file one after another, and also read what his colleagues wrote before him. The result was a kind of analogue of modern guest books and online forums. The program was named SndMsg, that is, Send Message, and the file in which the messages were stored was called a “mailbox”. Simultaneously with Send Message, a program for exchanging files between different computers Arpanet (a kind of prototype of the current FTP), for which the CypNet protocol was created.

One of the key problems that scientists wanted to solve at that time was the problem of messaging between users of different computers on the Arpanet network. The Send Message program was not suitable for this - it only worked on one machine. The CypNet protocol allowed for file transfer, but nothing more. At the end of 1971, Ray Tomlinson, a programmer at the company that developed Arpanet, began solving this problem. By that time, the network already consisted of 23 computers, some of which were united into nodes (the latter numbered 15). Ray Tomlinson wrote a program that did the same thing as Send Message, but not in local computer, but remotely. She sent a message via the CypNet protocol to a remote machine and there placed it in the same file - “mailbox” - as the local Send Message program running on it.

One of the modern legends about the Internet says that the moment of the birth of e-mail is associated with the time when Tomlinson checked the operation of the system and typed the top row of keys “qwertyui” on the keyboard and sent this “meaningful” message to another computer. In fact, this historical detail arose in the minds of journalists, who for a long time pressed Tomlinson to admit when the first email. Tomlinson spent many days debugging the program and, of course, sent test letters to himself many times, which is what he told reporters. They began to persistently ask: “What was written in the first letter?” Ray Tomlinson, a man of a non-public profession, did not understand that he could say a historical phrase like “The first email said: “We believe in God” or “I love you.” He honestly admitted that he simply typed the first characters he came across on the keyboard, because at that time he could not yet know that this letter was historical. But a journalist needs zest for an article. It doesn’t sound very strong: “The scientist never remembered what was in the first email.” Therefore, the reporter looked at his keyboard and found in the top row a memorable row of capital English letters - QWERTY-UI. This is how a “historical detail” appeared, which, with minor changes, travels around the world. As a result, one of the test letters of programmer Ray Tomlinson became the first, its text was “restored”, and the birth of E-mail moved to 1971. This means that email will be thirty-five years old this year.

The new program quickly gained popularity among Ray Tomlinson's colleagues. Almost immediately, he improved his creation - he added the function of ensuring the exchange of letters both between remote machines and between users of the same computer. For this purpose, a system for organizing postal addresses on remote computers was developed. When working with the program, each user of the local machine was assigned an address consisting of his name and the network name of his computer, separated by the “@” sign. (This symbol was used by Tomlinson instead of the preposition “at”, that is, the expression user@machine means: user so-and-so on the computer so-and-so.) The location of the “mailbox” of each Arpanet user became uniquely determined, which made it possible to easily carry out exchange messages between them.

Along with the improvement of mechanisms for transmitting electronic messages, the structure of the letter itself also changed. Until recently, the only type of information that could be transmitted via e-mail was simple text, but now it is not difficult to create an email with an embedded video or piece of music.

The need to send large volumes of messages constantly pushes for improvement of communication lines. And now the modem connection is a thing of the past, and most computers have round-the-clock access to the network. On the one hand, as long as there is constant technological development, the age of email will not pass. On the other hand, some scientists are already modeling the email of the future, suggesting that if it becomes possible to communicate through the transfer of thoughts, then mail servers, and the computer itself, will become redundant. These forecasts are partly confirmed by the people themselves. A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that today's teenagers view email as an outdated form of communication, preferring to communicate via Internet messengers. This opinion is held mainly by young people from 12 to 17 years old. They believe that they can communicate via email only with parents or with an educational institution, and with each other only via ICQ or another instant messaging program. This doesn't mean teenagers don't use mail. 90% of teenagers use e-mail in one way or another. But preference is given to Internet pagers.

Free email services compete with each other to see who has the largest mailbox. And according to ordinary users, the larger the volume of the box, the more difficult it is to deal with archives. The convenience of unlimited mail is only an appearance, because letters accumulate, and there is less and less time to sort through mail. And rarely does anyone return to selecting the most important messages and downloading them to their computer. As a result, the user buries years of life and tons of letters in his mailbox. The good thing about a small mailbox is that it prevents you from forgetting or losing it and helps you save the most important things. So maybe the best is the enemy of the good?

Laughing, Aristarchus clarified whether it was true that the grandmother was a magician.
Valentina, that was the woman’s name, confirmed this unscientific fact.
True, people go to her mainly to talk about toothache and warts.
In other areas of medicine, the grandmother fails.
.

It's nice to write about topics that don't involve surprises. And then you write about the history of a newfangled service, and you don’t really know whether it will remain popular in a couple of years or will sink into oblivion. I wrote, I tried, but tomorrow no one will be interested in it anymore. Another thing is things that are tried and true, which change and improve, but do not disappear.

The topic of today's conversation is the history of the emergence of a well-known and familiar service. Email history. Yes, yes, now e-mail is perceived as something obvious and obligatory for existence, but a few decades ago e-mail was still a curiosity.

Otherwise, let's take it in order.

How did email come about?

Back in 1965, when computers were big and their capabilities were small, a group of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote special program entitled Mail. It was assumed that with the help of this program people would exchange messages sent within the same computer system.

Don’t even look for the usual post office with the address in that ancient post office [email protected], lists, spam folder and other modern things. Things were more prosaic: the Mail “program” was a separate file with a unique name, where messages sent by users were added. Yes, not much, but it was at least something.

Further development of e-mail took place solely thanks to the US Department of Defense and specifically Ray Tomlinson(Ray Tomlinson), who in 1968 worked on the secret SNDMSG program as part of an equally secret development under the name APRANET.

APRANET-, which was developed exclusively for military purposes. It was assumed that the military would communicate with each other in closed network and this will completely eliminate the possibility of hacking from the outside.

SNDMSG(Send Message) is a program that would simplify communication between users of the APRANET military network. The secrecy of the project did not imply the disclosure of any information, and therefore civilians remained in the dark about these developments for a long time.

If you thought that with the advent of SNDMSG email had an interface that was at least minimally familiar to the modern user, I again have to say no. To be honest, the only cardinal difference new program became the ability to send a personalized message. The “mailbox” was still a special file in which sent messages were accumulated.

E-mail: the appearance of a “dog” and a smiley face in mature mail

Beginning in 1972, e-mail entered a phase of rapid development. There were two events that contributed to this. Event one - Ray Tomlinson's colleague finally created some semblance of a shell for an email client. His obvious achievements were sorting letters and sending files. Another six months later, Ray Tomlinson improved the functionality of the shell.

The second event, without which it is impossible to imagine modern email, was the appearance of the “ @ " In RuNet known as “dog”.

According to Tomlinson, the badge had nothing to do with dogs. I’ll try to explain the meaning Ray himself put into it: the “@” sign reads “at”, which translates as “on”. In Russian, creating address options using the formula “ [email protected]" means "*person's name* is on *server name*".

Another important period in the history of email was 1975, when John Vitall finalized the MSG program, making it similar to modern email. There was nothing like that in her before. Automatic replies have appeared, sorting letters has become more convenient and accurate, and the organization of some other processes within the framework of working with correspondence has improved.

And it’s interesting that at first three quarters of the traffic in the APRANET network came from mail messages. It even got to the point where there was a regular mailing of science fiction to employees.

Now about the smiley face.

Since its appearance, the emoticon (colon with a parenthesis, in case anyone has forgotten) is entirely due to email. In 1979 (at that time mail had already become available to scientists not involved in the defense industry), one of the scientists proposed to somewhat diversify communication by introducing emotional “islands” into the inhospitable officialdom of “dry” texts. As you understand, they became emoticons. The idea was liked by many, the smiley went around the world.

What else can I say about email? Since the article is not written for programmers, but for those interested in the phenomenon as such, I will not go into further details regarding changing protocols, expanding the potential of email, and so on. I’ll just say what you already know: today e-mail has replaced the classic paper mail and has become commonplace for billions of inhabitants of planet Earth.

When the foundations of the future of email were laid in the 1960s and 1970s, no one could have imagined that 50 years later more than 100 billion messages per day would pass through it. The power of email is that you can do multiple things at once. But this is also her weakness - she does nothing flawlessly. That is why messengers appeared over time, cloud storage, task managers and other applications that cope with individual tasks better than email. Perhaps IT and other industries would happily switch to a combination of , and or their analogues, but the inertia is too strong. Too much depends on email - from accounts in all these services to business correspondence.

Initially, electronic messages could only be sent between users of the same computer. To send and receive messages, both people had to remain connected to the system. One such system was the SNDMSG at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Letters fell into the user's directory - a prototype of a mailbox. In 1971, MIT graduate Raymond Tomlinson, working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies), ported SNDMSG to operating system TENEX and added the ability to forward messages between different computers over the network, effectively becoming the inventor of e-mail in the modern sense.

Email continues to take away a lot of time at majority users

Tomlinson's main discovery was the use of the @ symbol, which he used to separate the name of the user and the computer where the message was to be sent. The symbol has been preserved today, with the only difference that after it now comes not the name of the computer on the ARPANET network (the predecessor of the modern Internet), but the address of the server where the user’s mailbox is located. Tomlinson added the function of sending letters from one computer to another from the CPYNET program, which was used to send files over the network. That is why in the early 70s Tomlinson’s invention was called a “hack” - in fact, he did not invent the idea of ​​e-mail itself, but an add-on based on an already existing messaging system.

Over the next 40-plus years, email was modified on the fly: attachments began to be added to letters, correspondence between individual users began to be included in message threads, and applications like Google Inbox and Mailbox have brought the processing of incoming messages to automation. But email, with its constant stream of spam and meaningless correspondence, continues to waste a lot of time for most users. Whether it will be possible to abandon it over time, and most importantly, when this time will come, no one can say yet. The only thing that can be done for now is to reduce its use to a minimum, using more convenient tools for specific tasks.

A famous programmer from the USA is celebrating a symbolic anniversary. 40 years ago, Ray Tomlinson sent the first email using the “@” sign, or “dog” as it was popularly called, in the address. Since then, the scientist’s brainchild has been used by almost all the inhabitants of the planet, composing millions of virtual messages every day.

Almost half a century in one place. Ray Tomlinson has been coming to this street every morning since the mid-60s. At 70, he is still the best programmer in a company that carries out special orders for the military. But Ray’s main invention was not classified. At age 30, he invented email to send messages from one computer to another, mainly to colleagues in other rooms who didn't answer the phone.

Ray Tomlinson, inventor of email: "I think simplicity is key. An email address still looks the same 40 years later. Of course, now you can attach files, send something other than text, but the basic idea is clear and easy to remember , how to use it".

The essence of the invention is that the username is separated from the name of the server to which your computer connects. Figuratively speaking, until this moment, notes were exchanged over the wires, as it were, from hand to hand within the framework of one computer, Ray gave humanity a full-fledged electronic mailbox, into which letters from afar instantly arrive. He made the separator a capital letter "a" with a rounded tail. This symbol is used in English as an abbreviated spelling of the preposition "at", translated into Russian meaning: "at", "on" or "by".

The “at” sign, or, as it is called in modern Russian, the “dog” sign, appeared on the first typewriters of the late 19th century. But before the advent of e-mail, this inscription would have baffled any English-speaking reader.

The sign was used mainly in commercial correspondence, for example, indicating that a certain product could be bought for $25. This symbol came to today's English from ancient Europe; in the Middle Ages it denoted a measure of volume - one amphora. The New York Museum of Modern Art even houses manuscripts in which this sign is present. One dates back to 1536, the other is a hundred years older.

Ray Tomlinson, inventor of email: “Other characters could have been used, but they could have been confused with part of someone's name. So I immediately paid attention to the “at” sign, especially since in English it is almost verbatim: such- then the user, on such and such a computer."

Among the many advantages, this epoch-making invention also has its disadvantages, many New York postmen believe. Their bags now rarely contain handwritten letters - mostly bills or boxes of goods purchased on the Internet.

Samuel Adams, postman: “E-mail is killing our business. Because fewer and fewer people are sending simple letters, it’s easier for them to do it on the Internet - it’s faster. But we’ll last another 20 years. And who knows what will happen next?”

Unlike modern Internet innovators, Ray Tomlinson did not become a billionaire. He says that in the 70s there was no point in patenting an invention - there were too few users to make a commercial profit, and now the statute of limitations has expired, after which patents cannot be issued.

Therefore, the main capital of this inventor is worldwide fame among programmers and a place in history textbooks. As a person still in love with his profession, Rey is quite satisfied with this.

First half of the 60s of the 20th century.

The first programs were created that allowed users working on a “large” computer in multi-user mode to exchange text files with each other.

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, an employee of Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN), developed an email program for sending messages over a distributed network.

When creating the new program, two others were taken as a basis - an intranet mail program and an experimental file transfer program.

Ray Tomlinson recalled the first emails: “I sent myself a bunch of test messages, running from computer to computer. What kind of messages they were now I can’t even remember... It is likely that the very first message was QWERTYUIOP (consecutive letters on an English keyboard) or something similar.”

By March 1972, Ray Tomlinson had updated his email program for use on the ARPANET, the predecessor to the current Internet. It was at this time that the @ symbol began to be used in email addresses - “this is commercial” or in common parlance “dog”, “dog”. The thing is that on the Model 33 teletype machine, which was at the disposal of Ray Tomlinson, this key was used for punctuation and to indicate the English preposition at (on). Thus, email address kind<имя_пользователя>@<имя_домена>means nothing more than “a user with such and such a name on such and such a domain.”

In July 1972, Larry Roberts wrote the first program to make email easier for users. It made it possible to create and sort lists of letters, the user could select and read the desired message, save the message in a file, and also forward emails to another address or automatically reply to a received message. Strictly speaking, this was the first program mail client, allowing even non-specialists to easily manage email. In a short time, the program gained enormous popularity among the emerging online community.

In 1973, a study conducted by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) showed that 75% of all ARPANET traffic was email.

In 1975, the first mailing list appeared on the ARPANET. Its founder was Steve Walker. Soon, Einar Stefferud became the moderator, that is, essentially the editor and the person responsible for the newsletter. The first mailing was not automated and everything was done manually. The science fiction mailing list soon became the most popular unofficial mailing list.

In 1975, John Vittal developed MSG, the first all-inclusive email program that provided the ability to respond to received messages, forward letters, and sort correspondence.

On March 26, 1976, Queen Elizabeth II of England sent a letter by email for the first time, using the services of the Royal Signal and Radar Service in Malvern.

In 1977, Larry Landweber of the University of Wisconsin developed THEORYNET, which provided e-mail forwarding over a network of about 100 computer scientists. computer technology. The system was designed to work in TELENET.

• April 12, 1979 is the smiley's birthday. It was on this day that Kevin McKenzie, one of the apologists for “emotional” computers, wrote to the Message Services Group with a letter proposing the inclusion of some symbols denoting emotions in “dry” computer texts. For example, a combination :-). Despite the ensuing debate among supporters and opponents of the innovation, “emotional emoticons” soon became very popular among users. The current inhabitants of the Internet, who communicate both via e-mail and in real time, can hardly imagine their lives without such a familiar thing as “emoticons”. There is, for example, a special “Thesmileys! server" (http://www.pop.at/smileys/), where you can get acquainted with ways of expressing a wide variety of emotions using dots and other symbols. And even look at the animated ones.
• 80s.

In 1981, in order to satisfy the needs of American universities for high-quality network services and, first of all, e-mail, the CSNET (Computer Science NETwork), now better known as the Computer and Science Network, was created. New network was created jointly by scientists from several American universities (University of Delaware, University of Wisconsin, other universities), as well as Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN) and RAND Corporation.

In 1982, EUUG (European UNIX UsersGroup) specialists created the EUNet (European UNIX Network) specifically to provide users of UNIX systems with access to email and the ability to use USENET services.

On September 20, 1987, based on the CSNET protocol, electronic mail communication was established between Germany and China. It was on this day that the first email was sent from China to Germany.

In 1989, the first connection was established between commercial postal services and the Internet. The MCI Mail service was connected through CNRI (Corporation for National Research Initiative), and Compuserve through Ohio State University.

In 1994, email was first used to send advertisements. Later, such materials “clogging” mailboxes users with unnecessary information, called “spam”. The Arizona law firm “Canter&Siegel” became a pioneer in the distribution of spam. Initially it was an advertisement for the lottery and green card.

In 1997, in the catalog of electronic mailing lists Liszt (http://liszt.com/) almost 72 thousand mailings on a variety of topics were registered.

In 1998, Casio Phone Mate introduced the IT-380 E-Mail Link answering machine at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). According to the company, this is the first device of its kind to provide users with the ability to view received email messages.

In December 1998, software engineer Lin Hai and physicist Wang Yukai were convicted of distributing “virtual” leaflets via email to more than 250,000 other Chinese dissidents and foreign supporters of democratic reforms in the country. They were charged with inciting the overthrow of the government.

In 2000, the Internet was launched “ Yandex Mail» free mail service from YANDEX.

In the early morning of May 4, 2000, the “I Love You” virus began its journey through email networks. It turned out to be from the Philippines and was distributed through four hacked email addresses. According to experts, this virus caused damage worth at least $7 billion, and in the United States, for example, every 15th company suffered from this virus in one way or another. Oddly enough, such a massive “reproduction” of the virus once again confirmed the fact that e-mail has become a common network tool and is by no means going to lose its position even with the advent of new means of network communication.