A LITTLE EMAIL HISTORY FOR YOU
Tom Van Vleck was the guy who wrote the CTSS Mail command in 1965. The Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) was begun at MIT in 1961. It allowed multiple users to log into the the 7094 from remote dial-up terminals, and to store files online on disk.
Richard W. Watson, thought of a way to deliver messages and files to printers at remote sites. He filed his "Mail Box Protocol" dated Jul-20-1971 as a draft standard under RFC 196, but the protocol was never implemented. What the site did with such mail afterward was its problem. It is not clear this protocol was ever implemented. However, the ARPANET network was used as the connection between the two.
The First Email 1972
Ray Tomlinson worked as a computer engineer for Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), the company hired by the United States Defense Department to build the first Internet in 1968. His first email was sent between two computers that were actually sitting next to each other. At first you could only leave messages on the computer that you were using for other persons using that computer to read. Then Tomlinson used a file transfer protocol that he was working on called CYPNET to adapt the SNDMSG program so it could send electronic messages to any computer on the ARPA network. Ray's achievement was to choose the @ symbol to separate username from host name in mail addresses; to tell which user was "at" what computer, The first email message was "QWERTYUIOP". Ray Tomlinson is quoted as saying he invented email,"Mostly because it seemed like a neat idea." No one was asking for email. However, electronic mail had existed for years when he made his invention.
What's that @ all about?
@ was originally used as shorthand for "amphora", a measure of capacity based on terracotta jars used to transport grain and wine in the ancient Mediterranean world.
- 1) Historians in Italy have traced the origins of the @ symbol back to a Florentine merchant, writing in 1536, according to The Guardian.
- 2) Giorgio Stabile, professor of science at La Sapienza University, claims that he has unearthed the earliest known use of the symbol in a letter documenting the bounty contained within a ship arrived from Latin America. Stabile said the sign had made its way along trade routes to northern Europe where we turned it into the "commercial at."
- 3) In Spain, it is known as arroba which means a weight of six gallons, Italians call it a snail, others call it the elephant's trunk, a monkey's tail and even a cinnamon roll.
Geoff Goodfellow invented wireless email in the early 80's while at SRI -- the late internet protocol czar Jon Postel assigned him "port 99" for his tinkering. In the late 80’s he founded the second commercial Internet company, Anterior Technology, as well as founding, RadioMail, the first wireless Internet business in the early 90's. BIO
From: Peter Bachman Date: June 10, 2004 3:00:56 AM EDT Subject: [spam] letter from Jon Postel
Got an email addressed from Jon Postel today. Of course it was an infected W32.Netsky.D Worm that had scanned through someone's hard drive for email addresses, and not an message from the great beyond being channeled through a DSL connection.
Still it's a self-generated ironic comment by the network, on the sad state of email within the network. The great computational expense generated by sending spam out into the network is obviously wasted on trying to sell Viagra; that much bandwidth and computing power is evolving into something else; perhaps a very primitive early form of network intelligence that's linking up bits of information in odd, but somewhat predictable ways.
Now if the "random spam monkeys" can type up and send me an unpublished mss from William_Shakespeare@stratford-upon-avon.co.uk I can make money fast. I'll be waiting near the trash bin of my bayseian filters looking for submissions.Cheers,
Peter Bachman
How Email lists were invented.
The Queen of England sent her first email in 1976 from an Army base.
The First Spam?
Brad Templeton wrote a nice article on the history of spam on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the DEC salesman ARPANet spam. There was an earlier mass electronic mail message sent to a large community of unwilling readers [my definition of spam] that predates the 1978 DEC spam. This message was sent using CTSS MAIL about 1971, at a time of campus unrest and anti-war rallies. By the start of the 70s, there were over a thousand users of MIT's CTSS system, using the system by dial-up from the MIT campus and from other, mostly academic, locations. They used mail to coordinate, share information on all kinds of topics, etc, just as now. At that time, I led the system programming group for some of MIT's services including CTSS, and I was mighty displeased one day, probably about 1971, to discover that one of my team had abused his privilege to send a long anti-war message to every user of CTSS that began.
Fred Cohen first thought up the idea and wrote the first virus in November 1983 as a University of Southern California graduate student. During a weekly seminar on computer security, he conceived of a program that could infect other systems with copies of itself. This University of New Haven professor introduced the term "virus" to the lexicon of computers. His adviser at the time, Len Adleman--well known as a creator of public-key encryption and the "A" in a popular form of the security technology known as RSA (Rivest, Shamir & Adleman)--suggested that the programs were the digital analogy of viruses. The name stuck. Cohen used the phrase in a 1984 research paper, in which he described threats self-propagating programs pose and explored potential defenses against them. When he asked for funding from the National Science Foundation three years later to further explore countermeasures, and they said it wasn't of current interest. Two decades later, countless companies and individuals are still paying for that mistake.
