History of email

Electronic Mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages between people using
electronic devices. Email first entered limited use in the 1960s and by the mid-1970s had taken the
form now recognized as email. Email operates across computer networks, which today is primarily
the Internet. Some early email systems required the author and the recipient to both be online at
the same time, in common with instant messaging. Today's email systems are based on a store-
and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users
nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need to connect only briefly,
typically to a mail server or a webmail interface, for as long as it takes to send or receive
messages.
The history of email extends over more than 50 years, entailing an evolving set of
technologies and standards that culminated in the email systems we use today.
Computer-based mail and messaging became possible with the advent of time-
sharing computers in the early 1960s, and informal methods of using shared files to
pass messages were soon expanded into the first mail systems. Most developers of
early mainframes and minicomputers developed similar, but generally incompatible,
mail applications. Over time, a complex web of gateways and routing systems linked
many of them.
Email is much older than ARPANet or the Internet. It was never invented; it evolved
from very simple beginnings.

Early email was just a small advance on what we know these days as a file directory - it
just put a message in another user's directory in a spot where they could see it when
they logged in. Simple as that. Just like leaving a note on someone's desk.

Probably the first email system of this type was MAILBOX, used at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology from 1965. Another early program to send messages on the
same computer was called SNDMSG.

Some of the mainframe computers of this era might have had up to one hundred users
-often they used what are called "dumb terminals" to access the mainframe from their
work desks. Dumb terminals just connected to the mainframe - they had no storage or
memory of their own, they did all their work on the remote mainframe computer.

Before internetworking began, therefore, email could only be used to send messages to
various users of the same computer. Once computers began to talk to each other over
networks, however, the problem became a little more complex - We needed to be able
to put a message in an envelope and address it. To do this, we needed a means to
indicate to whom letters should go that the electronic posties understood - just like the
postal system, we needed a way to indicate an address.