Originating in 1965, a Mr. Ray Tomlinson is accredited with developing the first concept and building blocks of e-mail, locally, nationally, and ultimately internationally world-wide years later.
Email started as a University and database specific technology that allowed students, teachers, and staff the ability to share files with one another by accessing disk-data from various computers throughout the campus – based on a network approach.
Such remote-terminal access built upon the ideas of sharing wirelessly such data, and ultimately correspondences later on – for a variety of purposes, professions, or fields.
Believe it or not, DARPA – the United States government entity for technology and warfare – was of the first organization or entities to develop a to and from field. Additionally, it was the first to conceptualize networking, and total data sharing or (attachment) sending of messages, and doing so among various individuals in varying locations.
During this period, in 1977, forwarding of emails as well as carbon-copying and blind-carbon copying were also concepts that were developed or considered – and influenced.
DAPRA created Arpanet and by 1976, interestingly enough, Queen Elizabeth the second was the first head of state and government official to send an e-mail. E-Mail quickly popularized as it was demonstrated to be a local and worldwide connection of correspondences, details, documents, and data from a completely modernized technological concept.
By 1978, an Eric Schmidt designed Berknet, or Berkley Network, a system to send messages over serial connections. Additionally, Mr. Schmidt was also responsible for the supervision and development of Gmail.
Ironically enough, in the background (1979), a 14 year old by the name of Shiva Ayyadurai created a program called e-mail for a New Jersey school of medicine and dentistry. This internal messaging service and platform copy wrote its name, “email”, although originality and foundational credits are something of a controversy surrounding this, even to-date.
From Bill Gate’s Microsoft Mail in 1988 to CompuServe’s internet-based email in 1989, by the 1990’s multiple companies, founders, and ‘techies’ were crunching away at the concept of e-mail. These efforts included new platforms accessibility, and business development or marketing tools based around internal and external communication modules.
From Lotus Notes (swiftly purchased by IBM), to Hotmail (later to be Microsoft Hotmail), to Gmail, to AOL, this time period demonstrated a heightened competitive environment, marketing advantages, corporate and company development, and modernized methods of communication.
In fact, the concept of a PC, the internet, and email were all put together through AOL’s emailing service as considerably “one of the first”. And how could we forget those (30-day trial) mandatory CD’s that were required to access “America Online” and hear the infamous “You’ve Got Mail” known to-date across the world.
SPAM first originated right around 1990, yet into the mid to late 1990’s various and major e-mail services had already begun adapting, creating, and publicizing – as well as outsourcing – various applications, techniques, and server guards to dumb-down the amount of SPAM users/customers received. AOL and Hotmail appeared to have the most luck, and GMAIL wasn’t finally released outside of it’s invite.