Network Email Turns 34, Buys Corvette
|
Written By Reprise Media | October 24, 2005 | Share This
|
|
In addition to the 76th anniversary of the stock market tumble that kicked off The Great Depression, October also marks the 34th anniversary of the first network email.
Oddly enough, no one paid much attention to this momentous event. In fact, the content of the first email isn’t even recorded, though this article on Wikipedia says it was most likely “a message announcing the availability of network email.”
Gmail Engineer Paul Buchheit reflects on how email has changed over the years and why he chose to join a then-small start-up like Google in this post on the official Google blog:
“My email was a mess. Important messages were hopelessly buried, and conversations were a jumble; sometimes four different people would all reply to the same message with the same answer because they didn’t notice the earlier replies. I couldn’t always get to my email because it was stuck on one computer, and web interfaces were unbearably clunky. And I had spam. A lot of it. With Gmail I got the opportunity to change email - to build something that would work for me, not against me.”
Buchheit also hints at some future improvements:
“We also have a new batch of exciting innovations on the way that we hope will shake things up again and make Gmail even better for even more people,”
but remains vague on the exact details.
Read more on the first network email from the engineer responsible for the software, Ray Tomlinson (he also pioneered the use of the “@” symbol for email addresses).
Topics: Technology |