Father of Email -"just 200 lines of code"

Here are a bit of interesting facts posted on Creativegarh that I thought I should blog and preservere:


Did You Know?

E-mail is 30 + years old!

Electronic Mail - E-mail - was 'invented, by an American engineer, Mr. Ray
Tomlinson, and tried out for the first time, in mid-October 1971.

Mr. Tomlinson, then a programmer with a computer company, was working on
what was then rudimentary, two-year-old linkage of computers: ARPANET, the
networking of the of the US Defence Department's Advanced Research Project
Agency. He combined two programmes - an existing mail programme called
'SENDMSG' that worked only within an organization, and a file transfer
programme called 'CPYNET' - to create an e-mailing utility between the 15
computers then on the ARPRA-NET'.

Mr. Tomlinson's inaugural e-mail was a prosaic collection of letters from
the second row of the typewriter key-board: 'QWERTYUIOP'. Yet Mr. Tomlinson
is being belatedly addressed these days as a true pioneer of the Internet
Age and one of the core investors of modem communication technology.

He hit on the '@' symbol to separate the name of the user from that of the
host computer only in 1972. He borrowed the symbol from the character that
means 'at' on the old electromechanical, teletype tele-printer machines.
E-mailing speeds were 200 times slower than is achievable today with a
telephone connection.

A 1974 development - the invention of the TCP/IP Internet protocol by Mr.
Vint Cerf saw another building block of contemporary Internet fall into
place; while hypertext markup language (HTML) the lingua franca of the Net's
web pages had to wait till 1992. After that came the global explosion in the
use of e-mail. No one knows how many e -mails are exchanged every day - the
number is estimated to be in trillions.

Today, the father of e-mail is still with the same company: he is Principal
Engineer at BBN Technologies, acquired last year by the GTE. When contacted,
he dismissed his invention as "just 200 lines of code,"