P2P at the Start: The First Network Email

> http://openmap.bbn.com/%7Etomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html

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> firstemailside.html

Did you send the first network email?

As far as I know, yes. However, there are a few qualifications.
Network should be included because there were many earlier
instances of email within a single machine. Computer networks, in
any real sense, didn't exist until the ARPANET was built starting
in 1969. Dick Watson proposed a form of email in July 1971 (RFC
196). I don't think that was ever implemented. It differed in
that the mail was directed to numeric mailboxes. RFC 196 also
suggests that the final product would be a printer output (i.e.
ink on paper). SNDMSG sent messages to named individuals
(computer users).

Why did you do it?

Mostly because it seemed like a neat idea. There was no directive
to "go forth and invent email". The ARPANET was a solution
looking for a problem. A colleague suggested that I not tell my
boss what I had done because email wasn't in our statement of
work. That was really said in jest because we were, after all,
investigating ways in which to use the ARPANET.

Why did you choose the at sign?

The primary reason was that it made sense. at signs didn't appear
in names so there would be no ambiguity about where the
separation between login name and host name occurred. (Of course,
this last notion is now refuted by the proliferation of products,
services, slogans, etc. incorporating the at sign.) The at sign
also had no significance in any editors that ran on TENEX. I was
later reminded that the Multics time-sharing system used the at
sign as its line-erase character. This caused a fair amount of
grief in that community of users. Multics used IBM 2741 terminals
which used EBCDIC character coding. They did not have a "control"
modifier key and didn't have many (any?) non-printing characters
beyond space, backspace, tab, and return. The designers of
Multics were constrained to using printing characters for
line-editing.

What was the first message?

The first message of any substance was a message announcing the
availability of network email. The exact content is unknown, but
it gave instructions about using the at sign to separate the
user's name from his host computer name.

Did you receive any rewards, patents, etc.?

Not unless you consider the current interest in the origins of
email a reward.

What were the early uses of email?

The early uses were not terribly different from the current uses:
The exceptions are that there was only plain text in the messages
and there was no SPAM.

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> http://openmap.bbn.com/%7Etomlinso/ray/firstemailmain.html


The First Network Email

Ray Tomlinson


During the summer and autumn of 1971, I was part of a small group
of programmers who were developing a time-sharing system called
TENEX that ran on Digital PDP-10 computers. We were supporting a
larger group working on natural language. Earlier, I had worked
on the Network Control Protocol (NCP) for TENEX and network
programs such as an experimental file transfer program called
CPYNET.

I was making improvements to the local inter-user mail program
called SNDMSG. Single-computer electronic mail had existed since
at least the early 1960's and SNDMSG was an example of that.
SNDMSG allowed a user to compose, address, and send a message to
other users' mailboxes.

A mailbox was simply a file with a particular name. It's only
special property was its protection which only allowed other
users to append to the file. That is, they could write more
material onto the end of the mailbox, but they couldn't read or
overwrite what was already there. The idea occurred to me that
CPYNET could append material to a mailbox file just as readily as
SNDMSG could. SNDMSG could easily incorporate the code from
CPYNET and direct messages through a network connection to remote
mailboxes in addition to appending messages to local mailbox
files.

The missing piece was that the experimental CPYNET protocol had
no provision for appending to a file; it could just send and
receive files. Adding the missing piece was a no-brainer -- just
a minor addition to the protocol. I don't recall the protocol
details, but appending to a file was the same as writing to a
file except for the mode in which the file was opened.

Next, the CPYNET code was incorporated into SNDMSG. It remained
to provide a way to distinguish local mail from network mail. I
chose to append an at sign and the host name to the user's
(login) name. I am frequently asked why I chose the at sign, but
the at sign just makes sense. The purpose of the at sign (in
English) was to indicate a unit price (for example, 10 items @
$1.95). I used the at sign to indicate that the user was "at"
some other host rather than being local.

The first message was sent between two machines that were
literally side by side. The only physical connection they had
(aside from the floor they sat on) was through the ARPANET. I
sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the
other. The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have,
therefore, forgotten them. Most likely the first message was
QUERTYIOP or something similar. When I was satisfied that the
program seemed to work, I sent a message to the rest of my group
explaining how to send messages over the network. The first use
of network email announced its own existence.

These first messages were sent in late 1971. The next release of
TENEX went out in early 1972 and included the version of SNDMSG
with network mail capabilities. The CPYNET protocol was soon
replaced with a real file transfer protocol having specific mail
handling features. Later, a number of more general mail protocols
were developed.

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