About the history of e-mail creation. History of the creation and development of e-mail Your name or e-mail history
The history of the development of the Internet begins in the late fifties, when the second generation of computers was already operating in the world. The external international relations of the leading world powers, the USSR and the USA, pushed for new research necessary to protect and transmit information in a reliable way.
The US Department of Defense initiated the first developments of computer networks, from which the history of the development of the Internet began. Scientists from four famous American universities took an active part in them. Their computers were connected in 1969 by ARPANET, the first computer network.
ARPANET began to be quickly used not only by the military, but also by specialists in various fields of science. The first server appeared at the University of California (Los Angeles), the computer had a RAM capacity of 24 KB. The first communication session took place in October 1969 with the Stanford Research Institute, conducted by Charlie Cline and Bill Duvall.
In 1971, it became possible to send email, as a special program was developed. Subsequently, the history of the development of e-mail was pushed by the desire of users to expand the horizons of communication.
A year later, ARPANET became international, connecting Great Britain and Norway via telephone cable. In the seventies, the first computer network was used primarily for sending mail.
In 1983, the term Internet was assigned to ARPANET, and the following year the domain name system appeared.
The history of the development of the Internet continued with the creation of other networks that were built on data transfer protocols. John Postel played a special role in this process, who developed and standardized several network protocols: IP, ICMP, TCP, UDP, Telnet, FTP, DNS.
In 1984, the inter-university network NSFNet appeared, including other small networks, to which about ten thousand computers were connected within a year.
1988 was the year of the development of chat, a protocol that allowed real-time communication.
At the end of the eighties, the history of the development of the Internet again acquired new names. Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist who developed the HTML language and URIs, proposed the concept of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989.
In 1990, the first computer network left the Internet arena, and by 1995 it became the main provider of information on the Internet.
Currently, the world is unimaginable without the Internet. Finding useful information, shopping, business, entertainment - it is difficult to list all the possibilities of the global network.
The story is no less interesting than the history of the development of the Internet. Back in 1965, Tom Van Vleck and Noel Morris developed the first MAIL program. Subsequently, other scientists contributed to the creation of the modern appearance and functionality of e-mail:
Ray Tomlinson - special mail programs and the introduction of the @ symbol, which was also associated with the domain name in the address bar.
Larry Roberts is a program for creating and sorting lists of letters.
- Steve Walker - first mailing list
John Vittal - which provided the ability to compose a response to a received message, forward letters and sort correspondence.
A significant event was 1976, when Elizabeth II first used the capabilities of e-mail.
Over three decades, email has gained enormous popularity. Today it occupies a leading position in relation to others on the Internet. The software allows you to contact anywhere in the world from any computer, send not only a text message, but also files of other types. Such concepts as “emoticons”, “spam” and “viruses” came to e-mail.
History of creation The emergence of e-mail can be traced back to 1965, when Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) employees Noel Morris and Tom Van Vleck wrote the MAIL program for the CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System) operating system installed on the IBM 7090/7094 computer. The general development of e-mail was driven by the development of local user interaction on multi-user systems. Users could, using the mail program (or its equivalent), send messages to a friend within the same mainframe (large computer). The next step was to be able to forward a message to a user on another machine - this was done by specifying the machine name and the username on the machine.
1972 Ray Tomlinson (“Father of E-mail”), driven by the need to create simple means of communication for ARPANET developers, wrote basic programs for sending and reading electronic messages - he created an electronic mail system for communication within global networks.
Advantages of e-mail A letter will reach the most remote corner of the globe in a matter of minutes; You can receive and send mail at any convenient time; You can send one letter to several recipients, forward mail and much more; You can attach a file to an email.
Operating principles To organize e-mail you need: 1. An e-mail server is a program on a special computer, where there is a personal mailbox (a folder on the server disk) where messages are stored. 2. Mail client - a program that can access a mail server and send or receive mail messages from it. 3. Internet or local network access.
How Mail works. ru POP 3 Yandex. ru ISP Aport. ru Rambler. ru
There are two main ways to access mail servers Using an email client, which is a program installed on a PC that allows you to read messages from a mail server and send messages through the same server. In this case, all email messages (both received and sent) are stored in folders on the local disk of the computer. This method is most often used to organize mail services in local networks.
There are two main ways to access mail servers using a Web interface, in which a regular Web browser plays the role of a mail client. In this case, all mail messages (both received and sent) are stored on the Web server, which is the mail server. This method is most often used to organize a paid or free mail service on the Internet. In this case, you can use mail clients on your PC to work with Web mail servers.
Mail clients There are many mail programs, the most popular: – Outlook Express (up to and including Windows XP) – MS Outlook (2003, 2007, 2010, 2013) – The Bat! – Mozilla Thunderbird – Opera
Mail clients When using a mail client: – Program setup is required; – Letters are downloaded from the server and stored on your home computer (you can leave copies on the server); – Letters can be written without an Internet connection and sent later, i.e., work with mail can be done offline (except for sending and receiving).
Web interface All web mail servers create their own interface for working with mail, which is accessible from any browser. When using Web mail: – No settings are required to send and read letters; – Letters are stored on a Web server; – Letters can only be written, read, received and sent online.
Email protocols Sending client messages is carried out using the SMTP protocol (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) - this is the main protocol with which a message is sent from the client to the provider's mail server, which in turn immediately sends this letter through the DNS system - Internet servers to the mail server that hosts the recipient's mailbox.
Email protocols When receiving correspondence, the email client interacts with the server using the POP 3 protocol (Post Office Protocol 3). POP 3 typically requires username and password verification to prevent unauthorized access. In addition, the protocol involves clearing the mailbox on the server after the mail has already been received by the client.
Email protocols IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is a protocol for accessing email. It is an alternative to POP 3. The client is given the opportunity to manage messages in the mailbox and additional functions for servicing mailboxes on the server. When using IMAP, unlike POP 3, the connection does not drop while the user interface is active, and messages are downloaded only when requested by the client. This allows you to reduce response time for those whose mailboxes contain many large messages. IMAP allows multiple clients to access a mailbox at the same time and provides the client with the ability to monitor changes made by other clients connected at the same time.
Mailing Address An email address consists of two parts separated by the @ symbol: username @ domain name
The @ symbol The @ symbol is called differently in different countries. Americans and British call this sign “at”. This is our dog. The Germans see the outline of the @ symbol as a hanging monkey. For the British and French it is a snail. The Danes and Swedes call @ - the trunk of an elephant, the Hungarians - a worm, the Norwegians - a pig's tail, the Chinese - a mouse, the Greeks - a little duck, the Finns - a cat.
Mail address Computer name - the domain name of the mail server on which the user registered his mailbox; You can get a free mailbox on the mail servers of search engines Yandex, Rambler, Yahoo, Aport;
Mailing address User name - Login (login, login name, user mailbox name, account) is set by the user in accordance with the server rules; The username starts with a letter and can contain numbers, a hyphen and a period. It is better not to use other symbols. Name size is limited.
Mailing address The email address is written only in Latin letters, cannot contain spaces, uppercase and lowercase letters do not differ; Access to the mailbox is carried out after checking the password; A strong password must contain at least 6 characters and cannot be the same as your login. It's better to use a digital password that you won't forget;
Mailing address When you create a mailbox, a security question is created. If you forget your password, you can access your mailbox by answering the security question. Only you should know this answer. Entering check digits when creating a mailbox is protection against robot programs.
Some 80-70 years ago, email was considered the stuff of science fiction. Dreams of instant communication simmered in the minds of scientists, writers and ordinary people. But the appearance of the first computers, like a bolt from the blue, tore human minds out of technical illusions, opening up the real prospect of digital innovation - marking the beginning of the era of the World Wide Web and web technologies.
What about today? E-mail, or “soap”, mailbox is part of our everyday life. It is perceived as a kettle or a washing machine. It simply performs specific communication tasks and is not at all a luxury. Try to boast to them: “Here I have an e-mail! I'm very cool! At the very least, they will laugh at you. And more empathetic citizens will show concern for your mental health.
How can you react differently if so much time has passed since the history of the creation of e-mail, and now it is already used by over 100 million people all over the world. E-mail is a powerful tool for communication and data exchange. You can't go anywhere without him.
This short excursion will tell you about the emergence of computer mail and its modernization - from its origins to the present day.
60s: when computers were huge
Back in 1965, computers were truly gigantic in size, their circuits had millions of parts. They were very slow compared to modern PCs. That's when the history of email began.
In the summer of 1965, programmers Tom van Vleck and Noel Morris at MIT developed an application called MAIL based on an IBM 7090/7094 machine with CTSS OS. Of course, it was not at all similar to the email profiles and clients that you are used to seeing on the Internet.
MAIL was a special command built into the operating system rather than a separate module or program. It transmitted messages to users (programmers serving it) in one machine in the following format:
It was written briefly, for example: MAIL M1422 2911
Through this command, tasks were assigned to technical support workers. Messages were saved in a special storage file MAIL BOX, in the cell of the specified recipient.
In parallel with the experiment on the IBM 7090/7094, the development of a software mechanism for communication on the Q32 computer was carried out in the fall of 1965. This unit was developed for the War Department by IBM Corporation and installed in the offices of Rand Corp.
The idea of virtual correspondence received a new impetus for development in 1968. During this period of time, developer Ray Tomlins, as part of the military project ARPANET (the predecessor of the Internet), wrote a secret program called Send Message (SNDMSG). It provided communication between ARPANET users. But she still followed the canons of the new technology - the messages were placed and saved in a special mail file.
70s: let there be mail with a “dog” and emoticons
In 1971, the same R. Tomlins, being an employee of BBN (Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc.), created a new version. This application was written based on previous developments - a client for the intranet and an experimental module for sending files. In his memoirs, Ray talks about sending test messages with a chaotic set of characters from one machine to another to test the functions of the mail software.
In the spring of 1972, after painstaking modernization, Tomlins introduced his brainchild into the ARPANET defense network. Along with the new development came a new email address format, which is now accepted as a standard - a name with the “@” symbol (dog). On the teletype, “@” was used to indicate punctuation marks and “at” (in Russian - “on”).
In July of the same year (1972), developer Larry Roberts revealed the prototype of a desktop email client. His program was able to create catalogs of messages, copy messages and place them in a file container, forward messages to other people and use an answering machine. Among the small network community at that time, figuratively speaking, Roberts’ new product was a success. They began to actively use it.
In 1973, ARPA management, after analyzing the traffic on its network, came to the conclusion that 75% of its traffic came from e-mail correspondence. Two years later, in 1975, the first mass mailing to mailboxes appeared on the ARPANET web. It was created by Steve Walker together with moderator Einar Stefferud. The authors sent information letters manually. Subscribers received science fiction news from them (SF-Lovers).
Also in this year (1975), John Vittal introduced his all-inclusive client. It was equipped with a full range of functions for working with correspondence.
On March 26, 1976, Elizabeth II, using the equipment of the RSRE communications service in Malvern, personally sent a dispatch by computer mail.
In 1977, Wisconsin scientist Larry Landweber wrote THEORYNET, an application that forwarded correspondence across a network of over 100 IT workers. It has been adapted for use in TELNET.
On April 12, 1979, the legendary emoticon was “born,” without which not a single virtual conversation can take place today. On this significant day, Kevin McKenzie sent a request to the Message Services Group network association with an original proposal - to “dilute” the texts of electronic messages with symbols denoting emotions, for example, “; -)". His request caused fierce debate among experts: some welcomed this form of communication, while others were categorically against it. However, emoticons soon became widely used in everyday virtual communication.
80s: evolution of globalization
The history of email is closely interconnected with the development of network technologies. She practically walked hand in hand with her along the steps of technical evolution.
So, in 1981, the CSNET “web” was built for universities, which provided the opportunity to correspond by e-mail and use ARPNET. Scientists from the universities of Wisconsin and Delaware, as well as specialists from BBN and RAND Corporation, worked together on it.
1982 was marked by the emergence of the EuNet network from a group of scientists at the European Unix Users Group. Its tasks included providing correspondence by mail and providing USENET services to owners of machines with a UNIX system.
On September 20, 1987, an electronic message was sent from China to Germany using the CSNET protocol.
In 1988, the developers of the FidoNet network provided their clients with the opportunity to communicate with users from other networks.
A year later, in 1989, communication between the Internet and commercial postal services was established for the first time.
90s: e-mail to every home
In the 90s Since the last century, e-mail technology has acquired the status of a powerful communication tool accessible to a wide range of users.
In 1994, spam mailings were first recorded.
In 1997, the number of mailings on a wide variety of topics in the Liszt catalog reached 72 thousand. On March 8 of the same year, Yahoo! Mail.
In the fall of 1998, the Russian-language mail service Mail appeared on the Internet. Casio PhoneMate has released the IT-380 E-Mail Link device for working with online correspondence.
2000s: register your soap, it's easy!
With the advent of the millennium, the soap industry has grown to unprecedented proportions. Postal services began to appear on the Internet like mushrooms after rain. Businessmen, programmers, and ordinary Internet users began to actively use e-mail. However, the scale of the industry also entailed some negative manifestations.
2000 Early in the morning of May 4, many users discovered the “I Love You” virus in their mailboxes. His "strain" was spread from the Philippines through broken boxes. The total damage of the malware amounted to $7 billion. In the United States, virtually every 15th company suffered to one degree or another from this malware. On June 26, the Yandex.Mail service launched.
Nowadays, at the turn of the second decade of the 21st century and the new era, e-mail continues to actively improve as an IT technology and every year provides the user with more and more useful options for comfortable communication, exchange and storage of data.
12.03.2013
Email is significantly older than ARPANet or the Internet. Email was never invented, it evolved from very simple beginnings.
Early email was just a slight improvement on what we know these days as a file directory - it simply placed the message in another user's folder in a specific location where they could see it simply by authenticating themselves. Like leaving a note on someone's desk.
Probably, first email system this type of mailbox was used at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1965. Another early message sending program on the same computer was called SNDMSG.
Some computers of this era had up to a hundred users, often using so-called "simple terminals" to access the central computer from their workstation. A simple terminal only connected to a mainframe - it had no storage or memory of its own, they did all their work on the remote mainframe.
Before the Internet, therefore, email could only be used to send messages to different users on the same computer. When computers started talking to each other over a network, this problem became a little more complicated - we had to be able to put a letter in an envelope and route it where we needed it. To do this, we need a means to indicate who the letter should be sent to, something like a postal system, we need a way to indicate the address.
That's why Ray Tomlinson is credited invention of email in 1972. Like many of the Internet pioneers, Tomlinson worked for Bolt Beranek and Newman as an Arpanet contractor. He picked up the "@" symbol on his computer keyboard to represent sending messages from one computer to another. So, for any use of Internet standards, it was simply a matter of separating username@machinename. Internet pioneer Jon Postel was an early user of the new system, and described it as a "Beautiful Hack." He certainly was, and remains so to this day.
Despite what the Internet offers throughout the world, email remains the most important application of the Internet and its most widely used feature. More than 600 million people around the world now use email.
By 1974, there were hundreds of military users of ARPANET email as it was eventually encouraged. Email became the savior of the Arpanet, and caused radical changes in ARPA's goals.
From this point on, email developed rapidly. Larry Roberts invented some mail folders for his boss and he could now sort mail, a great achievement. In 1975, John Vital developed several programs for organizing email. By 1976, email had really taken off and commercial packages began to appear. Within a few years, 75% of all ARPANET traffic was email.
Email took us from Arpanet to the Internet. Here was something that ordinary people all over the world wanted to use.
As Ray Tomlinson remarked a few years later about email, "every single development walks on the heels of the previous one and is so closely followed by the next that most improvements are obscured. I think everyone will remember a few personalities." It's true - cataloging all the events would be a huge task.
One of the first new developments when personal computers arrived on the scene was “offline reading.” Offline reading allowed email users to save their email on their own personal computers, and then read it and prepare replies without actually being connected to the Internet - much like the Microsoft Outlook we can work with today.
This was especially useful in parts of the world where telephone costs to the nearest postal system were expensive. (often this involved international calls in the early years) With network connections costing many dollars per minute, it mattered to be able to prepare a response without being connected to the phone, and then connect to the network to send it. It also benefited from the fact that "offline mode" allows for a more user-friendly interface. Being connected directly to the receiving email system in this lax standards era often meant the Delete and Backspace keys would not work, the inability to see typed text directly on the computer screen, and other such annoyances. Offline mode helped many.
The first important email standard was called SMTP, or Simple Message Transfer Protocol. SMTP was very simple and is still in use - however, as we learn later, SMTP was a fairly naive protocol, and did not try to find out whether the person claiming to send the message was the person they purported to be. The spoofing was (and still is) very simple in email addresses. These are the main flaws in the protocol, which will later be exploited by viruses and worms, as well as security scammers and spammers to form an identity. Some of these issues are still being addressed in 2004.
But as it evolved, email began to take on some very interesting possibilities. One of the first good commercial systems was Eudora, developed by Steve Dorner in 1988. Pegasus Mail appeared soon after.
When Internet standards for email matured POP (or Post Office Protocol) servers began to emerge as a standard - before then, every server was slightly different. POP is an important standard allowing users to develop email systems that will work with each other.
These were the days of per-minute email charges for individual dialup users. For most people on the Internet in those days, email and email discussion groups were the main purposes. They had many hundreds of them on a wide range of topics, and as a news organ they became known as USENET.
On the World Wide Web, email began to be provided with a web-friendly interface by providers such as Yahoo and Hotmail. Usually it was free. Now that the message has been made available, everyone wants at least one email address, and the facility has been adopted by not just millions, but hundreds of millions of people.
The story is retold using materials from the site nethistory.info, the author of the original English text is Ian Peter.
It is still difficult to say who exactly invented email as a technology. The main version today is that the greatest contribution to the creation of this technology was made by the American Ray Tomlinson.
Although before its invention, users were able to send messages to each other, they could only do this on one computer. Even when computers were networked, there was no talk of individual mailing and no one had any idea. And only together with Tomlinson’s ideas, a method of targeted delivery of messages to specific users was proposed. His invention can be considered one of the most important achievements in communications of the 20th century. This is where the modern history of email creation began.
Tomlinson's main idea was to link the username and the computer on which he works. As a result, the following way of writing an email address was proposed - username@usercomputer. As you can see, this standard for writing an address has not changed even now, decades later. The only change was to the name of the user's computer, which was replaced by the domain of the user's website or email provider.
Confidentiality
Technically speaking, email refers to private methods of communication and communication, like a phone call or a handwritten letter. Although the specifics of how email is classified in this regard varies from country to country, it is generally an offense to gain unauthorized access to and publish information from email communications. This is very important to understand, although it is not difficult for hackers to hack into the email account of an ordinary user. Quite often, company owners force their employees to sign an agreement granting the right to monitor and read all electronic correspondence sent or received to their corporate mailbox. The main reason for this behavior can be considered the desire to provide, located in the office premises.
Another issue with email privacy is the fact that any email message leaves a permanent trace in the communications environment. That is, deleting a message in one's own mailbox is only a visible event, but the user can never be sure that it was deleted without a trace. A deleted email is quite easy to recover.
Even if you use special software to delete all traces of email communications on your local computer, copies of the messages may remain with the sender or recipient, or on one of the mail servers through which they passed. This is why sending very important information via email is dangerous. At a minimum, encryption systems for electronic communications should be used. Please also note that since emails are automatically logged and stamped with the time and date of sending/receiving correspondence, courts are more than happy to use this information to track the chain of any events.
Current state of affairs
The value of such a phenomenon as e-mail is difficult to overestimate. The famous United States Postal service, for example, processes more than 485 million regular letters per day every day. While in the United States alone, 39.6 billion emails are sent annually. In other words, the volume of electronic correspondence is 81 times greater than the volume of the largest postal system in the world.
Of course, the lion's share of this figure today is the so-called “spam” that we receive daily in our own email boxes. As a result, the volume of work of regular postal services has been falling at a rapid pace in recent years, being completely replaced by more convenient and faster electronic services.
