The History of Email

Email is defined by Google as messages distributed by electronic means from one computer user to one or more recipients via a network. With the creation of the email the world has been more connected than every before, we are now able to send a message from the US all the way across the world to Japan in a matter of seconds all thanks to the creation of Email. But we cannot begin to discuss the creation of email without first discussing ARPA and ARPANET. ARPA short for Advanced Research Projects Agency was created to help fund and promote research in 1957 after the Soviet Union created Sputnik. So in 1966 ARPA created ARPANET, which is short for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, to help connect Universities and Research centers share their findings. So after the creation of ARPANET email was slowly beginning to take shape when messages were being sent via file directory. This type of mailing was when someone sent a message through a mainframe, which was an unused computer called a "dumb terminal", to another persons computer that was also connected to the same mainframe. This type of mailing was first used in 1965 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and for it's time it was very innovative but it was also very limited since you could only message someone who was on the same mainframe. But as this technology grew we were able to send messages through a network which allowed people to message others remotely over long distances, but the only problem was that there wasn't any way to address where these messages were supposed to go. It was only until 1972 when a former ARPANET contractor created a way to address these emails. Ray Tomlinson chose the @ symbol to send messages from one person to another, he created the format: name-of-the-user@name-of-the-computer; which is close to how we format our address nowadays. After Ray created a way to address emails, it wasn't until 1974 when Emails really began to gain traction when hundreds of military personnel began to use Emails after ARPANET began to encourage it. After this there were many new improvements to email that skyrocketed it popularity; in the same year the first email folder was created, in 1975 an ARPANET employee, John Vittal, created a way to organize email, and finally in 1976 Email really took off when 75% of ARPANET was using emails to communicate. Eventually with the creation of the World Wide Web friendly interfaces like Yahoo, AOL and eventually Google made email more accessible. After these creations and improvements email was brought to our mainstream life and the use of email has only grown more popular and in today's population more than 600 million people use email to communicate everyday.