December 7, 2001
The 30-Year Path of E-Mail
By KATIE HAFNER
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| (Rick Friedman for The New York Times) |
| He's not the father of e-mail, but Ray Tomlinson devised a program 30 years ago to send e-mail from one computer to another over a network. |
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| (U.S. Postal Service) |
| The United States Postal Service introduced E-Com, for Electric Computer-Originated Mail, in 1982, but abandoned it in 1985. In 1981, the General Accounting Office predicted, incorrectly, that e-mail would put two-thirds of postal workers out of work by 2000. |
IT wasn't an accidental invention, exactly, but it was certainly one that followed an unexpected trajectory to glory.
Thirty years ago, give or take a month or two, Ray Tomlinson, an unassuming computer scientist at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, an engineering firm in Cambridge, Mass., sat down at his computer and wrote a relatively simple computer program that enabled electronic messages to travel from one computer to another.
Since then, e-mail has become such a fixture in so many people's lives, it is hard to imagine life without it. According to the International Data Corporation, some 9.8 billion electronic messages are sent each day. E-mail is a communications mainstay of businesses. It is the glue that keeps far-flung families together. Romantic relationships find both outlet and solace in it.
In some ways, observed Nico Macdonald, a principal of Spy, a London-based research firm, e-mail has become the ultimate medium through which humans use computers — to organize discussion groups, deliver news stories, confirm purchases, signal updates to Web pages or play chess. Or as he put it in the language of the Internet age, "E-mail has become an entire personal information environment."
Those are just the obvious aspects of life with e-mail.
In dozen of other, less obvious ways, e-mail has profoundly changed the way people communicate, as its unique properties have let it settle into a place all its own among forms of human interaction.
E-mail's inventors weren't necessarily thinking about the medium's less evident advantages — that it makes time- zone problems evaporate, or that it can be the virtual sherpa for transporting documents, photos and video clips. Yet those are the benefits that continue to propel its use upward, with the number of users worldwide estimated in the hundreds of millions.
Then there are the perils. What you post to a mailing list may show up in Internet archives many years later. A finger glancing off the wrong key could catapult a message into cyberspace prematurely or send it to the wrong address. More ominously, opening a booby-trapped message can make you both a victim and an unwitting carrier of a computer virus conceived by a malicious code writer.
And almost from the start, e-mail was something to hide behind.
David Walden, an engineer who worked at Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) with Mr. Tomlinson in the 1970's, recalled a turning point of sorts for him. "I remember when I realized that I could apologize in writing for a problem and thus make the situation better," he said, "and the person I was working with couldn't see me and thus couldn't read my body language, that I didn't' really feel contrite," he said.
E-mail is also a snapshot of one's mood from day to day, or even hour to hour.
"One of my kids saves e-mail for a year then sends it back to you as a kind of flashback to the past," said Vinton G. Cerf, a founder of the Internet and a senior vice president at WorldCom, the communications services company. "You would not do that with paper mail but it is easy with digital, electronic stuff."
With all those uses, the sheer volume of e- mail has, in fact, become overwhelming. It seems clear that like other technologies before it, e-mail has not simply replaced a way of doing things; it has created its own demand. In-boxes are increasingly filled not just with spam from strangers and well- meant but unwelcome humor from friends, but with single-sentence requests from higher-ups that translate to hours of extra work, and mile-long attachments from colleagues that must be read, and now.
Yet people live with it because, by now, they cannot live without it.
Mr. Tomlinson's clever little hack was not the very beginning of e-mail. It already existed in the 1960's, when computer scientists sent e-mail within time-sharing systems — one computer with multiple terminals.
But Mr. Tomlinson, who is now a principal engineer at BBN Technologies, was the one who made it possible to send e-mail from one machine to another over a computer network. While he was well known for his programs, he became better known for a simple decision he made while writing them.
He needed a way to denote the separation between the name of the user from the name of the machine the user was on. His eye lighted on the @ symbol. Unaware that he was creating an icon for the wired world, that is what he chose. And equally unaware that his first message would someday be the object of historical scrutiny, Mr. Tomlinson said he made no mental note of what he first tapped out on the keyboard.
Through the 1970's, the use of network mail, as it was called back then, grew not exponentially, but as gradually as the Internet itself. The Internet started as a tool for research into computer networks, and e- mail was its counterpart to the interoffice memo. In fact, correspondence over the government-sponsored Internet, and its forerunner, the Arpanet, was to be restricted to official network business.
But from the start, people knew how to use e-mail in the name of distraction. One of the first network mailing lists, called SF- Lovers, was devoted to science fiction fans. The network's users, typically graduate students, began turning to e-mail to play games, exchange gossip, carry on relationships, carry out drug deals or circulate "Impeach Nixon" appeals.
With activities like those, not to mention the passion that can accompany scholarship, e-mail was not a sedate medium for long. Mr. Walden remembers seeing the first e-mail-based vituperation, later known as flaming, sometime in the mid-1970's.
"It was a really nasty flame from someone at M.I.T., and we complained to his boss that civility was still in order, even by e- mail," Mr. Walden said. "Of course, it was only a short time before flaming had a name and it wasn't worth bothering to try to stop it."
By the early 1970's, three-quarters of all traffic on the Arpanet was e-mail. And as the medium grew, some turned their attention to making it more practical. For example, sending e-mail was simple, but trying to read or respond to it was a huge annoyance. Text poured onto the screen in a stream, with nothing separating one incoming message from another. And there was no reply function.
Lawrence Roberts, who was then a manager at the Advanced Research Projects Agency's Information Processing Techniques Office, solved that problem after his boss began complaining about the volume of e-mail piling up in his In box. In 1972, Dr. Roberts produced the first e-mail manager, called RD, which included a filing system, as well as a Delete function.
Further improvements to network mail were made by John Vittal, who in the 1970's was a young programmer at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. Mr. Vittal spent many hours working on the program, which he called MSG, in his spare time. It included not just a Delete command but also an Answer feature, enabling a recipient to reply to a message easily. His program eventually became the de facto standard of the Arpanet.
More and more, the functionality of e- mail took on features of conventional correspondence. Two of Mr. Vittal's creations were the cc and bcc features — appellations whose origins, in the carbon paper that smudged many a copy, now seem part of prehistory.
"There was a feeling that for user understandability we had to mimic traditional written forms of communication — office memos, letters, post cards," Mr. Vittal said. "Drawing parallels helped people understand what they could do."
E-mail's wider potential did not go unnoticed. The General Accounting Office predicted in 1981 that electronic mail would sharply reduce the volume of conventional mail and would cut postal employment by two-thirds by 2000. (Its foresight was a bit blurred: e-mail and other competition notwithstanding, the volume of letters doubled in the last two decades, and the postal work force grew by 20 percent.)
As the use of computers in offices grew, various commercial e-mail services, none connected directly to the Internet, indeed cropped up. But all of them failed.
MCI Mail, developed in the early 1980's by MCI, the telecommunications company that is now part of WorldCom, was one very visible attempt to introduce e-mail to the business world. An elaborate, feature-rich service, MCI Mail was well ahead of its time. Not only could users send electronic messages of up to 500 characters for 45 cents, but for an additional charge they could also have MCI print and send those messages through the postal system or by courier.
The world was so unaccustomed to electronic mailboxes that MCI Mail included an alerting service by which MCI employees called recipients by telephone to tell them to check their electronic mail.
Yet MCI Mail, introduced in 1983, did not catch on. Nor did the Postal Service succeed with its version — E-Com, for Electronic Computer-Originated Mail, introduced in 1982 and abandoned in 1985.
"It was a very, very tough sell in the business world," said Dr. Cerf, a co-developer of MCI Mail. "The question was always, `What's e-mail, and why do I need it?' But it was like being the first on your block to have a telephone — `Well, who am I going to call?' "
But finally, with the advent of the World Wide Web and the opening of the Internet to commercial traffic, the network itself became widely accessible to the public at large in the mid-1990's. By then, online services were routinely providing home users with an Internet-based e-mail account. And not coincidentally, that was the period when America Online, most spectacularly, begin to take off.
By 1996, 300 million pieces of e-mail were sent on the average day, and roughly 100 million people worldwide were using the medium, according to estimates by the International Data Corporation.
Yet for all that has been done to make e- mail — like the telephone or the television — a tool of the masses, it has always suffered from what might be described as technocentrism.
Mr. Walden told the story of trying to set up e-mail for his 87-year-old mother, who has Parkinson's disease. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Mr. Walden said, he helped her through the AOL software. "I told her what to do as she slowly moved the mouse and struggled with not being able to double- click fast enough," he said. He showed her how to type a message, with many characters typed twice because she couldn't remove her fingers from the keys quickly.
"E-mail still comes out of the culture of the computer technologist and the assumption that people want and will deal with lots of little buttons, windows and message boxes," Mr. Walden said.
Actually, Mr. Walden pointed out, more primitive systems from the early 1970's like Dr. Roberts's RD program or Mr. Vittal's MSG might be easier for people like his mother to use.
Moreover, Mr. Walden said, the more useful and ubiquitous e-mail becomes, the more susceptible it is to the viruses and worms that circulate with alarming regularity through cyberspace.
Still, all the viruses and spam combined will not stop e-mail from remaining, at its core, a tool for one of the most basic of human tendencies — the desire to be in touch.
Dr. Cerf said he occasionally received grateful messages from people who met over the Internet, courted via e-mail and are now married.
"I hope they stay together because I don't want to get blamed if they don't," Dr. Cerf said. "The one thing you learn is not to take too much credit because at some point you might have to take a lot of blame."
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
