The Speculist

Factoid from Yahoo: The first email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson to himself.

Dating when the first email was sent depends on how you define email. Yahoo's apparent definition seems right: an electronic message that is capable of being retrieved on another computer that is sent over an electronic network.

Tomlinson sent a test message to himself from one computer, over Arapanet, to a second computer located right next to him.

Tomlinson had been fooling around with two programs called SNDMSG and READMAIL, which allowed users to leave messages for one another on the same machine. He applied the idea behind these programs to a third program called CYPNET, which allowed users to send and receive files between computers.

Tomlinson later introduced the "@" symbol within email addresses.

This was 20 years before most of us even heard about "email."

It's been claimed that it was about the same time when the phrase, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed," was coined.