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Who sent the first e-mail?

our-picks.com — For those of you who had asked themselves this question at least once until now, and for those of you who are just curious in finding out the answer, I have searched around and found a few hints.

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  • 1bloke, on 10/12/2007, -42/+9I did.
    • plamoni, on 10/12/2007, -28/+10first post != first email ;-)
    • dtd00d, on 10/12/2007, -24/+6Probably Ted Stevens and his "series of tubes," way back in the day when you COULD download the entire internet.

      (But only if you had a broadband connection of 4 baud.)
    • ItchyMcknobster, on 10/12/2007, -29/+72AL GORE!
    • cantankerous, on 10/12/2007, -12/+6We all knew you'd say that.
    • Sblader5, on 10/12/2007, -17/+4god?
    • rewen, on 10/12/2007, -2/+69probably the inventor of email.
    • loki440, on 10/12/2007, -13/+3Your Momma. She was trying to get a hold of Moses.
    • Braxo, on 10/12/2007, -9/+39I don't know who sent the first, but I just sent the last e-mail.
    • jrizzo, on 10/12/2007, -21/+8@Sblader5

      God has no place in technology. Don't contaminate my PC with your religious icons.
    • sideshowRAHEEM, on 10/12/2007, -2/+53Some guy from Nigeria who needed to get his money out of government holding.
    • taylorscott, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13Ray Tomlinson speaks:

      http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html

      This is a better article, straight from the horses mouth.
  • Etherfast, on 10/12/2007, -12/+1...and I hope the article answered your questions :P
    • somerandomnerd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Not really, to be honest. You're about 10 years out.

      "He was actually playing around with two programs called SNDMSG and READMAIL that allowed users to leave messages to each other on the same machine."

      Bearing in mind that this was a time when "the same machine" would commonly have several terminals and there was already messaging software that would send messages between users...

      Also bear in mind that Douglas Engelbart's "Mother of all demos" in 1968 demonstrated email publically, 3 years before Tomlinsons messing around with message software (along with the first public demonstrations of the mouse, the GUI, video conferencing, hypertext, the paper paradigm and pretty much everything that we take for granted in computers today.)
  • mattsidesinger, on 10/12/2007, -4/+40And who sent the first "Internet" in an e-mail?
    • Etherfast, on 10/12/2007, -8/+7That, I couldn't find out unfortunately. There's more browsing for me to do :)
    • adml_shake, on 10/12/2007, -11/+19I'm still waiting for mine, my secretary said she sent it 2 weeks ago. I'm guessing by now it's just on the wrong dump truck or going down the wrong tube.
    • detlev409, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15I'm betting some guy at CERN.
  • Alphateam, on 10/12/2007, -34/+4I got a better question, who cares who sent the first e-mail?
    • Etherfast, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Well, the ones that just want to know. I don't really think it's that relevant nowadays, the important thing is the point were we have all reached regarding the electronic communication.
    • JohnyD, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12Dude.... why the ***** are you posting here if you don't care?

      Or maybe you were just asking it as a rhetorical question... which would again be pointless as the digg community probably does not want to digg down 1000 posts of "I care" and "I don't care".
    • drawkbox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Or, who will send the last email... muahahahahahaha
  • GrendelT, on 10/12/2007, -26/+128 diggs to the main page, with only 6 comments. Slow day?
    • elnerdo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Why do people always post stuff like that?

      "431 diggs, and only 78 comments, and front paged?!?!?!?!"

      Seriously, It JUST is. Things get front-paged PURELY by magic and lasers. You can not EVER comprehend the power of the magic OR the lasers, so it is not for you to know how this got to the front page.
  • martin77, on 10/12/2007, -6/+17odds on that it was a spammer flogging viagra.
  • adml_shake, on 10/12/2007, -4/+22Who sent the first email? I don't know but I bet it was someone who had a great deal to re-mortgage your house, car, or anything else you're paying for. Or someone who had a great deal on prescriptions from Canada, or knew how you could make your penis or breasts bigger.
    • pixelguru, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That was the subject of the SECOND email.
      (the first message was just a test)
  • fani, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Wow. A piece of history. Great find. !!
    its important to know these small folks who did such wonders years ago so we can do the things so easily that we take for granted. Hurrah for Ray Tomlinson.
  • Stradenko, on 10/12/2007, -8/+8Typing "email" into wikipedia says Ray Tomlison. If you spent more than ~2 minutes on this, you (specifically, your web searching skills) suck.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email
    http://openmap.bbn.com/%7Etomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html
    • Claymore, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8from wikipedia all I see is:
      "Ray Tomlinson initiated the use of the @ sign to separate the names of the user and their machine in 1971"

      The other side you reference has:
      Did you send the first network email?
      As far as I know, yes. However, there are a few qualifications. Network should be included because there were many earlier instances of email within a single machine.

      Hardly conclusive...
    • TheTankengine, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3My god, I haven't seen hideous frames like that in so long!

      Quick, somebody web 1.5 that site!
    • Stradenko, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0@Claymore
      the second page comes from wikipedia as well (in the external links section)

      http://www.google.com/search?q=who+sent+the+first+email
      has more than one result that can confirm it was Ray. Etherfast's own extensive research seems to confirm this (or what I saw before the page went away)
  • Claymore, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8and what was in the email? the modern day equivalent to: "Watson, come here. I need you."
  • ryanfelix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7LOL DUGG for the comic at the bottom
  • lmarburg, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7QWERTYUIOP such an inspiring message
    • dxbmatt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Considering he was using a DVORAK keyboard, amazing!
  • giveer, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7http://duggmirror.com/tech_news/Who_sent_the_first_e_mail

    That didn't take long.
  • ryanfelix, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9http://www.duggmirror.com

    edit: got beat like a little girl by qiveer... thumbs down for me..
  • greeneyedmama, on 10/12/2007, -14/+3It wasn't Al Gore?

    /sarcasm
  • ihavebeenseen, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1the Brainspawn
  • iam1e3t, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Service Temporarily Unavailable? didn't know that was a valid email address
  • FearlessFreep, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Sorta brings up an interesting question...who was the first naked woman posted on the internet?
  • mohrt, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Of some interest, mistakes Ray Tomlinson made while working on SNDMSG:

    http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/mistakes.html
    • taylorscott, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I think you mean:

      Mistakes others make about the history of email, according to Ray Tomlinson.
  • soxos, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Here's an article about who sent the first spam. It was a DEC salesman, if you don't already know. http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html

    I'm more interested in who sent the first internets and why it took so long for Senator Stevens to receive it.
    • strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Wow. I like the response from the Army (?) Major chastising the guy for doing so.
  • VirgoanVenom, on 10/12/2007, -9/+1This guy doesn't have any proof. Lame.
  • Nougat, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Here's something sort of kind of related:

    http://digg.com/offbeat_news/First_Emoticon_Usage
  • justintsmith, on 10/12/2007, -4/+0Im pretty sure it was the famous DARPA technician, Dr. Woogivesafuk.
  • UltraNurd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Strangely enough, I happened to pee in the urinal next to Ray Tomlinson today at work.
  • badogg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4If you are the first to send it, who would be the recipient? :)

    So if a message popped up on someones machine, they must have been like "What the hell?"
  • pardonmedoug, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2There was an NPR piece a week or so ago about Abraham Lincoln's use of "T-mail." Apparently Lincoln was the first President to have access to technology enabling near-instantaneous nationwide communication. He used it to win the Civil War by communicating with his generals.
  • 0KonTroL0, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1the question is...

    Did anyone recieve it?
  • reyitocazador, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4This is one impatient author...

    FTA:
    "But I’ll start with the beginning."

    One sentence and 27 words later...

    "To skip to the point, the first message was sent by Ray Tomlinson..."
  • Avian00, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Ted Stevens!

    And it just arrived! Dang those TUBES!!
  • oonix, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Alexander Graham Email was the first.
  • blynder, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2So we have this guy to blame for SPAM, I wonder if he went through the same dilemma as Einstein did with nuclear fusion
    • wstrucke, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1yes and blame alexander graham bell for the telemarketers calling you while you sit at home waiting for the pizza you just ordered on the phone.

      even if that was supposed to be a joke... lame.
    • somerandomnerd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I blame Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel.
  • TheSeeker11, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2The answer is obvious - Chuck Norris.
  • Etherfast, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1911 calls Chuck Norris, right? :)
  • waldo21, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1For anyone interested in the history of the internet and its creation, I recommend a book called "Where Wizards Stay Up Late".
  • edgecurve, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Found it. Thanks to Google I was able to find an exact text of the first email:

    "I am CHIEF(DR.)BODE GEORGE., Chairman to the Contract Review Panel that
    was recently inaugurated by the President of the Federal Republic of
    Nigeria to review the activities of past military government with
    particular reference to contracts awarded by all ministries between
    1990 to 1999. In the course of carrying out our assigned duties, we
    discovered the sum of USD40.5 (forty million, five hundred thousand
    dollars) only lying idle in a suspense account with our apex bank. This
    funds emanated from grossly over-invoiced contracts awarded to
    conglomerate of foreign firms by the Petroleum Ministry on behalf of
    the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. On completion of our
    assignment, this amount was deliberately not included in our report
    because we want to capitalize on this once in a lifetime opportunity to
    benefit and make a fortune out of it. The only option we have to
    achieve our aims and objective is to have this fund transferred to a
    country of our choice where it can be kept in trust and safe custody
    for us. We are however handicapped at the moment by our status as civil
    servants, which barred us from operating foreign accounts while still
    in government service.

    Thus, through some discreet inquiries from our Chambers of Commerce,
    you and your organization were revealed as being quite astute in
    private entrepreneurship. On this premise, we have no doubt in your
    ability to handle a business of this nature, which informed our desire
    and wish to enter into a partnership with you. This business involves
    the remittance of this amount into your bank account with the hope of
    travelling down to meet you physically in order to receive our share.
    We hope to invest some in profitable ventures in your country based on
    your advise while the balance will be repatriated home as foreign
    earnings. We have mapped out strategies and all paperwork is in place
    to ensure a 100% success.

    The nature of your business at present does not really matter because
    in the world over, bigger firms do bid for big contracts especially in
    third world countries like ours and can subcontract part of it to other
    firms for execution. That is you or your firm will be regarded as one
    of those that executed one of such projects and therefore entitled to
    receive the over-invoiced amount of the contract value since the
    original contractor has been paid. Be rest assured that this
    transaction is 100% risk free as there is actually no risk is involved
    either now or in the future for we are well connected in official
    circle. Given our level of commitment at the moment, we want to assure
    you that with full dedication on your part, the objective of having
    this fund remitted would have been realized within a period of two
    weeks. It is hereby expressly agreed in principle that at the end of
    the transaction, you will be entitled to 25% of the entire sum, 75%
    will be for my colleagues and I.

    If you are interested in this proposal, please for confidential reasons
    respond only to my private email address:bodegeorge@phantomemail.com
    for more clarifications. If however you are not interested, still let
    me know to enable me search for someone else to carry out this business
    with.

    I anticipate a timely response from you.

    Thanks.

    Yours Sincerely,

    CHIEF(DR.)BODE GEORGE"
  • hiscity, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Never believe anything you read in digg (or anywhere else) without checking.

    (I'm actually beginning to believe that bored soon to be unemployed newspaper journalists with nothing better to do are the ones posting all the nonsense on the web.)

    http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html

    =quote=

    Mail

    The CTSS MAIL command was proposed in an undated Programming Staff Note 49 by Louis Pouzin, Glenda Schroeder, and Pat Crisman. These folks were working on the design of a new, improved file system for CTSS with many additional features. Numerical sequence places the note in either Dec 64 or Jan 65. PSN 49 proposed a facility for the system operators so they could inform users when lost files were retrieved from tape, by sending a message to a file in their directory.

    Noel Morris, Jun 68 I was a new member of the programming staff at the time, and read the document about the proposed CTSS MAIL command, and asked "where is it?" and was told there was nobody available to write it. So my colleague Noel Morris and I wrote a version of MAIL for CTSS in the summer of 1965. Noel was the one who saw how to use the features of the new CTSS file system to send the messages, and I wrote the actual code that interfaced with the user.

    My design contribution to electronic mail was that the original PSN described a limited facility for the CTSS machine operators to notify users when requests to retrieve lost files were completed. I argued successfully for a general facility that let any user send text messages to any other, with any content, instead of a special-purpose command controlled from the 7094 console switches.

    MAIL was a privileged command, that could do things normal user programs could not: it used the call (shown in MAD)

    ATTACH.(PROB, PROG)

    to switch to the recipient's file directory, and then added the message to the user's private-mode mailbox file on disk.

    The CTSS MAIL command took pairs of arguments, the problem and programmer numbers of the recipients:

    MAIL M1416 2962

    would start sending a message to me. You had to know the problem and programmer numbers for the recipients.

    You could send mail to everybody on your project by typing

    MAIL M1416 *

    You couldn't send mail to * * (that is, all users on all projects) unless your programmer number or problem number was canned into the MAIL program. Dick Mills's (assistant director, Project MAC), Bill Bierstadt's (system administrator, MIT Comp Center), and my programmer numbers were baked into the code. We, and any user on the problem number M1416, used for CTSS system programming, could send messages to all users.

    The MAIL command created or appended to a file called MAIL BOX in the recipient's home directory. Privileged users could send URGENT MAIL instead, and could send mail even if the user's disk quota was exhausted. The LOGIN command was modified to print

    YOU HAVE MAIL BOX

    or

    YOU HAVE URGENT MAIL

    at login if these files existed and had nonzero length.

    I went to a lot of trouble to insert new mail at the top of the file, so that the most recent message was first. (I regretted this after some experience, and when I wrote the initial unsecure Multics mail command, I just appended new messages to the bottom.)

    Since it uses the ATTACH. call, I believe MAIL could not have been implemented until after the CTSS New File System, which was put up for users on 8/9/65.

    The listings for the source of CTSS are online in Paul Pierce's Collection. The source of MAIL is the first file in file COM5 on tape S1. Authors are not listed but the code is recognizably mine, by comments, style, and indentation.
    = unquote =


    But I reckon it really depends on how you define "electronic-mail."


    http://www.cs.utk.edu/~shuford/terminal/teletype_news.txt

    = quote =

    _HISTORY OF TELETYPEWRITER DEVELOPMENT_

    Area I. In 1902 a young electrical engineer named Frank Pearne
    solicited financial support from Joy Morton, head of the Morton Salt
    interests. Pearne had been experimenting with a printing telegraph
    system and needed sponsorship to continue his work. Morton discussed
    the matter with his friend, Charles L. Krum, a distinguished
    mechanical engineer and vice president of the Western Cold Storage
    Company (which was operated by Joy's brother, Mark Morton). The
    verdict for Pearne was favorable, and he was given laboratory space in
    the attic of the Western Cold Storage Company.

    After about a year of unsuccessful experimenting, Pearne lost
    interest and decided to enter the teaching field. Charles Krum
    continued the work and by 1906 had developed a promising model. In
    that year his son, Howard, a newly graduated electrical engineer,
    plunged into the work alongside his father. The fruit of these early
    efforts was a typebar page printer (Patent No. 888,335; filed August
    22, 1903; issued May 19, 1908) and a typewheel printing telegraph
    machine (Patent No. 862,402; filed August 6, 1904; issued August 6,
    1907). Neither of these machines used a permutation code.

    They experimented with transmitters as well, applications filed in
    1904 and 1906 maturing into Patents No. 929,602 and No. 929,603.
    These patents covered modes of transmission which depended both on
    alternation of polarity and change in current level.

    By 1908 the Krums were able to test an experimental printer on an
    actual telegraph line. The typing portion of this machine was a
    modified Oliver typewriter mounted on a desk with the necessary
    relays, contacts, magnets, and interconnecting wires (Patent No.
    1,137,146; filed February 4, 1909; issued April 27, 1915). As a result
    of the successful test of this printer, Charles and Howard Krum
    continued their experiments with a view to developing a direct
    keyboard typewheel printer.

    They sought most of all to discover a way of synchronizing
    transmitting and receiving units so that they would stay "in step."
    It was Howard Krum who worked out the start-stop method of
    synchronization (Patent No. 1,286,351; filed May 31, 1910; issued
    December 3, 1918). This achievement, which more than anything else
    put printing telegraphy on a practical basis, was first embodied (for
    commercial purposes) in the "Green Code" Printer, a typewheel page
    printer (Patent No. 1,232,045; filed November 28, 1909;issued July 3,
    1917).
    :
    :
    :
    = see link for rest =

    http://www.cs.utk.edu/~shuford/terminal/teletype_news.txt
    • drawkbox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That was long winded for: WHat type of email are they talking about? BBS were email of some sort, message boards, morse code etc. They are *probably* talking about MIME based email from RFCs. IF so I would imagine that it would be devleopers of these standards: http://www.imc.org/rfcs.html . RFCs, MIME messaging run email, http, etc.
  • stonyherr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0someone else asked (and answered) this back in 2001.

    http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20010824.html
  • Braynid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1How cool is that?! And all of as were to search and find his back to 2001 post?
  • Chris24, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Thomas Edison used the first light bulb. The Inventor of electronic mail, probally used it first :-) At least for testing.
  • gigarizil, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0i wonder what Ray Tomlinson is up to today?
  •  

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