Happy Birthday, E-Mail

TWIT would like to wish e-mail a happy birthday.  In case you didn't know, e-mail is 35 years old this fall.
Sometime during the fall of 1971, Ray Tomlinson modified a computer file transfer protocol to work with a simple mailbox program and sent the first e-mail message from one computer lab to another.  In case you're wondering, the message was "QWERTYUIOP".  Unfortunately, it caused the two-computer network to crash.  But from that message sprung a new form of communication that turned an obscure symbol into a cultural icon:  @.

Tomlinson said that the @ sign seemed to make sense.  He said he used the @ sign to indicate that the user was 'at' some other computer rather than being local.  It makes perfect sense to me.  At first, Tomlinson's e-mail messaging system wasn't thought to be a big deal.  When he showed it to a golleague, he said "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on."  Ironically, we do the same thing today when we're at work e-mailing friends and family - "This isn't what I'm supposed to be working on."

I'm sure that Tomlinson never dreamed that in three short decades, e-mail would go from being the preferred mode of communication of a few scientists around the U.S.A. to playing a key role in the daily lives of millions of people around the world.  Today, businesspeople, journalists, students and millions of others beging and end their days with e-mail.  Now we can even send e-mails wirelessly from cell phones, pagers and PDAs.   But at no time since it's conception was e-mail's important role as apparent as it was after 9/11's attacks. 

E-mail servers around the world were swamped, processing a flood of messages as jammed phone lines forced pepole to turn to the internet and e-mail as they attempted to verify whether family, friends and colleagues were safe.  Yesterday in TWIT, you learned about one such incident at David Barkway contacted his office via his Blackberry to ask for help after the first Tower had been hit. There were thousands of reports of e-mails received from people in both Towers sending e-mails before the Towers collapsed.

So, happy 35th birthday, e-mail.  What a way to celebrate.