Electronic Mail

ELECTRONIC MAIL

ELECTRONIC MAIL. The exact origins of electronic mail (or E-mail) are difficult to pinpoint, since there were many nearly simultaneous inventions, few of which were patented or widely announced. According to the standard account, computer-based messaging systems emerged alongside computer networks of the early 1960s, such as the pioneering "time-sharing" computer system installed on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The MIT system and those that followed were intended to allow multiple users, sometimes spread out in various computer labs around campus, to access a central computer using keyboard and monitor terminals. The geographic dispersion of the terminals led to a desire for a convenient text message service. The resulting service at MIT was called "Mailbox," and may have been the first, but there were many similar programs written at about the same time.

By all accounts the first electronic mail program intended to transmit messages between two computers was written in 1972 by the engineer Ray Tomlinson of the company Bolt, Baranek and Newman [BBN]. MIT and BBN were both involved in the development of Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the computer network that became the basis of the current Internet. In modifying Mailbox for this purpose, Tomlinson contributed the now-ubiquitous use of the "@" character to separate one's unique user name from the name of the host computer.

One of the well-known anecdotes of ARPANET lore is the way that the network, intended for research purposes, was regularly used for sending electronic mail messages. Indeed, electronic mail, along with the electronic bulletin board, became by far the most popular applications by the mid-1970s. As the volume of mail grew, programmers at various institutions around the United States and in Europe collaboratively improved the mail system and imposed technical standards to allow universal service.

It was estimated that less than ten thousand electronic mail messages were being transmitted per day in 1976, compared to about 140 million postal messages. By the end of the decade there were an estimated 400,000 unique electronic mailboxes across the country.

The relatively unplanned growth of the Internet (successor to ARPANET) makes it difficult to track the diffusion of electronic mail usage after the 1970s. In addition to the Internet, a host of mutually incompatible "dial-up" networks (such as Compuserve) existed, many of which also fostered the growth of E-mail usage. Many of these services were later absorbed into the Internet.

E-mail gained many new users as universities began making Internet service available to most students, and as corporations such as IBM encouraged its use on private networks by managers and executives. By the 1990s, E-mail came to refer only to electronic messaging via the Internet, which had now linked most of the previously separate computer networks in the United States.

Like the personal computer itself, E-mail usage by businesses became common several years before individuals began using it at home. Yet by the late 1990s, approximately forty percent of all American householders owned a computer, and twenty-six percent of those families had Internet access. An estimated 81 million E-mail users generated 3.4 trillion messages in 1998.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Boston: MIT Press, 1999.

David Morton

See also Computers and Computer Industry ; Internet .