It is a common occurrence in old movies: Our hero checks in at a hotel in some exotic locale, and the desk clerk says, “Ah, Mr. Barker, there’s a letter for you.” Or maybe a telegram. Either way, since humans learned to write, they’ve been obsessed with getting their writing in the hands of someone else. Back when we were wondering what people would do if they had a computer in their homes, most of us never guessed it would be: write to each other. Yet that turned out to be the killer app, or, at least, one of them.
What’s interesting about the hotel mail was that you had to plan ahead and know when your recipient would be there. Otherwise, you had to send your note to their home address, and it would have to wait. Telegrams were a little better because they were fast, but you still had to know where to send the message.
Early Days
In addition to visiting a telegraph office, or post office, to send a note somewhere, commercial users started wanting something better at the early part of the twentieth century. This led to dedicated teletype lines. By 1933, though, a network of Teletype machines — Telex — arose. Before the Internet, it was very common for a company to advertise its Telex number — or TWX number, a competing network from the phone company and, later, Western Union — if they dealt with business accounts.
Fax machines came later, and the hardware was cheap enough that the average person was slightly more likely to have a fax machine or the use of one than a Telex.
Computers
It is hard to remember, but through much of this time, you were probably more likely to have access to a fax machine than a computer that was connected to anyone outside of your immediate office. In 1962, MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) had a way for users to share files, and, of course, they did. By 1962, the IBM 1440 could send messages from terminal to terminal. Not really email, but it was a start.
People sharing files on CTSS led to a MAIL command by 1965. Each user had a local file called, in a fit of originality, MAIL BOX. Anyone could append messages to the file, but only the owner could read or edit it. Other early systems got the idea quickly.
By 1971, ARPANET — the granddaddy of the Internet — got SNDMSG to handle mail between networked computers. It could also transfer files. Each address had a local part and a remote hostname. In between? The “@” sign. The first message went between two PDP-10 machines that were in sight of each other. The developer, Ray Tomlinson, is often credited with inventing modern email. He would continue to drive mail innovation as part of the International Network Working Group.
Tomlinson’s program caused an explosion of similar mail programs. Unix had one. IBM was developing what would eventually become its office suite for mainframe computers. The University of Illinois had PLATO IV, which offered, among other things, mail.
The Rest of the World
In 1978, CompuServe started offering mail, primarily aimed at commercial customers. In the next year, they’d launch MicroNET, allowing people to dial into a computer to, among other things, send and receive mail.
By 1981, Compuserve rebranded its mail service as EMAIL, although it probably wasn’t the first to coin that term. That same year, IBM rolled out its internal system to the rest of the world. PROFS was widely used in the business world, and it wasn’t uncommon to hear people say they “sent you a PROFS.”
The biggest differentiator, of course, was if you could send mail to other people using your (presumably big) computer, other people on your network, or anywhere. There were plenty of schemes to get local mail off the local machine, like UUCP, for example.
The 1980s saw an explosion of LANs that had their own servers, and these usually offered, at least, local mail services. Of course, you could also buy software from Microsoft, Lotus, or others to provide mail.
The Internet
Back then, normal people didn’t have access to the Internet. That’s how companies like CompuServe, and their main competitor The Source, managed to entice people to sign up for services. They would often have gateways to other mail systems and, eventually, the Internet, too. But 1985 would see the formation of Quantum Link. Never heard of them? Maybe you’ll remember in 1989 when they changed their name to America Online and, later, AOL.
For whatever reason, AOL took over that market. By 1995, AOL had around three million active users, and its signature “You’ve got mail!” audio clip, voiced by the late Elwood Edwards, was a cultural icon. In addition to email, it pioneered instant messaging and flooded the market with free trial disks.
Of course, people started getting access to the actual Internet, so all the specialized mail providers suffered.
Milestones
The first head of state to send an email? Queen Elizabeth II, back in 1976. Jimmy Carter was the first known presidential candidate to use email in 1976. Astronauts on the Space Shuttle (STS-43 in 1991) were the first to send email from space. It was pretty complicated, as Scott Manley discusses in the video below.
Less inspiring, Gary Thuerk sent the first spam message over ARPANET in 1978. The topic? A new product for DEC.
Modern Mail
Modern mail primarily relies on SMTP, IMAP, and, sometimes POP. Surprisingly, these protocols date back to the early 1980s, but were mostly part of the ARPANET until the Internet opened up.
Of course, the protocols have changed with time. E-mail needed to adapt to TCP/IP and DNS. Today, the protocols have provisions for validating senders to help stop spam, as well as to encrypt messages. But at the core, the technology that moves mail around the Internet is mostly unchanged. The nice thing: you can send to someone without knowing where they’ll be and when they’ll be there. Mr. Barker doesn’t have to get a packet from the front desk anymore.
Glossed right over the pre-DNS considerations of how mail got routed. Before you had a phonebook of IP addresses to know ‘prep.ai.mit.edu’ by its number, you had to give your data a route. Instead of joe@theirserver.com you had myserver!nearbyserver!anotherserver!servernearthem!theirserver!joe and each machine had a list of known host connections in /etc/hosts which could form a viable next step in a route.
Heh, I remember using that trick in the early 1990s to get ‘extra’ disk space on the university system (we got 1MB iirc). Uuencode a file and send it to yourself via a list of geographically diverse sites. Delete the file, do what you needed, and then wait for it to come back. Normally took 30 mins or so!
Did similar on an IBM370 (MVS, IIRC) in the 80’s. Mail, as well as several other classes, was spooled in the system spool space until claimed by the recipient (printer channel, outgoing mail client for BITNET, user mail client, UUCP bridge channel, system user, whatever). The spool space was publicly indexed but had varied lifetimes, based on the recipient.
The space wasn’t charged to the recipient, so, in the end, the administrators added classes for source and recipient being tied to the same user and set the lifetime to very short, as so many people were kiting files to get past the user limits that the spool space was not sufficient for its actual job. The commercial clients really didn’t like it when their overnight jobs failed on print due to fully committed spool allocation.
IIRC, the spool space was a bunch of 3350’s, which were also the general allocation for VSAM and other block formatted files.
1984 I worked at DEC, so the routes would usually include DECWRL, a well-known host (DEC Western Research Labs)
And the early days of email lists, like “SF-lovers”
I do remember the PDP-10 as an undergrad where you could send email to another person on the same computer.
Grad school and a System/370 (VM/CMS), you would “punch” virtual cards on your virtual card punch and send them to the recipient’s virtual card reader.
and if you messed it up and sent personal email through a satellite link you got very pissed off email from one of the sysops on one or the other end of the satellite link about how bandwidth was too precious to be used on personal email. (This was me trying to schedule my flight home from college with my dad who was going to be picking me up at the airport, mid 1980’s.)
Ahh! the old bang! separated email routing. It got quite interesting to figure out the route, and if one of the intervening computers was down, your email might get stuck in limbo.
Back in the day I used to read “the internet” in the morning, and get my work done after lunch. Yes, read the whole internet. Well, it was just newsgroups back then.
I miss Usenet newsgroups. Technically, they’re still in existence, but the last time I looked at Usenet, it was a pale shadow of what it used to be. Reddit is not a horrible sucessor, but it’s just not the same.
You have to click the second link: https://hackaday.com/2025/01/16/forgotten-internet-uucp/
“…about the hotel mail was that you had to plan ahead and know when your recipient would be there.”
I did quite a bit of work in the backwoods/bush/boonies (pick your slang for ‘far away from any paved road’) back in the pre-email era. Bush camps, no hotels, no fixed address. The “hack” around that at the time was to send the letter to General Delivery at a specific post office. You walk in and ask for your mail or packages. Worked great. No fuss.
By the ’80s we were doing wireless email over VHF radiotelephone, using Silent 700 terminals and acoustic couplers. Worked not so great, when we found that most of us field grunts couldn’t type. :-)
I send everybody’s mail to general delivery. It’s great for sending a surprise birthday/Christmas package without tipping off the recipient by asking for there address. Also my ID says general delivery on it, my address stays the same so I don’t have to inform the DMV of an address change. I originally had it put on there when I was homeless due to the daily harassment cops always asking “what happened at this address why can’t you go back there”
Best be careful about naming the inventor of email.
Shiva Ayyadurai is well-known for claiming that title……
Oh, that was EMAIL. Carry on.
/jk, in case it’s needed.
There’s all the other non-Internet email systems to consider. Not just uucp, there was BITNET, EARN and DECNET, FIDONET and JANET coloured book addressing schemes for email. Before a lot of places were connected by the TCP/IP protocols, there were other protocols used to exchange email, each with their own take of what an email address should look like. The sendmail.cf back in the day could recognise all these different transfer protocols and direct traffic to the appropriate transport, which may be X.25, may be all sort sorts of vendor-proprietary stuff. I distinctly remember chaining together multiple addressing schemes through mail relays to get an email to a contact who received it in-flight over the South Atlantic in the back of a Hercules transport plane over a very slow shortwave radio data link.
don’t forget WWIVnet! :)
for a while i ran a bespoke gateway between SMTP email and WWIV. yeah a ton of address translation was going on..layers of explicit routing in the address.
I believe the original email protocol allowed to send email to all recipients in domain by sending to @domain.com (skipping the username) and was hardly used by users.
“in a fit of originality”
I have never met a good programmer who was also good at naming things.
The four hardest problems in programming:
Caching
Naming
Off-by-one errors