Invention of email
By: Bhuvan Pawar
Tags: Email, USA, Software Development, India, Inventions

Photo by Onlineprinters on Unsplash

I’m sure you all have your email address, I made mine one when I was in 5th or 6th class, you know just to connect with my friends on Facebook. We know about email, how to use it and we all have used it. Today everyone have an email address and it kind of become a necessity to have one so that teachers could connect to student’s parents, or a company could reach you after your interview or for even promotion also. This made me think about its invention and development. Let me share what I’ve learned about its origin and creation, without delaying further let’s start.

What is an e-mail?

We all know what it is, electronic mail, right. A mail sent by a person to you through the internet using an electronic device like a computer, laptop, or mobile phone. It is just like a traditional mail, one person sending something to another person through a medium, here the medium is the internet like a delivery man in the traditional mail.

How did it develop?

In 1969, the US department of defense wanted a program so that they can send information rapidly. They executed ARPAnet, Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, a network through which they connected numerous computers across the department within the organization inside a single internal network. On October 29, 1969, the first message had sent from a computer to another computer on ARPAnet. So the key to developing e-mail had started there. Then in 1971, Ray Tomlinson created the electronic mail or 'e-mail' as we know it today, by using ARPAnet’s networked email system. So that’s how he developed the 1st system able to send mail between users of different hosts across ARPAnet using @ sign.

What was the significance of @ sign?

The sign @ shows the destination of the mail linked with the username. We all have our email address in this format username@email.com, so the @ links username with the destination of the mail, where the message intended to go. E-mail operates across the network, primarily the internet.

So by 1976, 75% of all the ARPAnet traffic was electronic mail, the medium had proved to be very useful and new ideas began to pop up in the minds of people to send e-mail to a user on a computer outside of an internal network and with the course of time and development that had also developed and people was able to send each other emails anywhere in the world. Also between organizations emailing became very popular, a need had created for software to develop involving storage and arrangement. And that’s how the modern email inbox originated.

What was the need to made the e-mail?

E-mail allowed you to share files online, it was very fast with respect to the traditional post, you can have two copies of your work, one soft copy and a hard copy in your hand. The major advantage of the email was that it could send 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It was cheap and could be sent anywhere in the world. You could contact with any person, you just needed their email address.

There’s also a controversy in the development of email, Shiva Ayyadurai, an Indian-American scientist had claimed that he created the world’s first email and this statement of his had widely discredited. That’s how email invented. By a curious mind who just helped to share and connect the world. And now there are more than 2.6 billion active users, 4.6 billion email accounts in the world. So fly the bird of your curiosity in the sky of information, be curious, and to know your curiosity type click here to discover your curiosity type.