In the 1980s, the Post Office Protocol for TCP/IP codified the communication between email clients (which run on the user’s computer) and the email server (where messages are received from other systems and stored), so that there could be independent implementations of both on different computers and operating systems.Įventually many email clients were written for personal computers, but few became as successful as Eudora. The first email on the ARPANET (the predecessor of today’s internet) was sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, and mail formats became standardized ( RFC 524, RFC 561) soon thereafter. These early systems, which often used propriety communications networks and protocols, were generally incompatible with each other you could only exchange mail with people using the same system. By now billions of people have used email.Įmail has a long and storied history, dating back to MIT’s Compatible Time Sharing System ( CTSS) and the US government’s AUTODIN in the early 1960s.
The ability to quickly send and receive messages without having to be online at the same time created a new form of human communication. Software Gems: The Computer History Museum Historical Source Code SeriesĮlectronic mail is one of “killer apps” of networked computing.
