The origins of email are complex, with early versions dating back to 1965. The @ symbol was introduced in 1972 by Ray Tomlinson, making it easier to address messages. Early providers included MAILBOX and Eudora, while Hotmail and Gmail revolutionized web-based email.
Determining who the first email providers were is actually a little more complicated than it sounds. Email itself has amorphous origins, as it was a natural evolution from file systems to the type of email we know today. Depending on how you define email, the older providers could go back as far as 1965.
In the early days of computing, something like modern e-mail naturally developed. Different users working on the same workstation usually had their own individual directories, for storing their various work files. Colleagues who wanted to leave them a message could then write a message and leave it in their friend’s personal directory, so that they would see it the next time they logged on to the system.
While very different from modern email providers, this was nonetheless a kind of email. In many ways, it was like leaving a letter at someone’s front door, rather than delivering it to a post office. The first of these early providers was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in 1965. It was called, simply, MAILBOX.
By the early 1970s computers had evolved a bit. Instead of everyone working on isolated mainframes that couldn’t communicate with each other, they were now able to communicate from one computer to another. This meant that it was a bit more complex to send someone a message than just putting it in their personal directory, because you also had to identify which computer they were on. To facilitate this, an easy addressing system was needed. In 1972 a man named Ray Tomlinson, who worked for the ARPANET, the predecessor of the modern Internet, came up with something quite similar to modern electronic mail.
Tomlinson decided to use the @ symbol to separate the user’s name from the host computer. Using that symbol methodology, anyone on a network could be addressed simply using the format name@computer. This simple little “trick”, as it was once described, would have a revolutionary input. The ability to easily communicate over the ARPANET via email made it incredibly useful for the military personnel who were spearheading its development. Not only that, but this was something that had an obvious civilian use. This small development in 1975 meant that e-mail accounted for more than three-quarters of ARPANET traffic, and people in the outside world were starting to get excited about its potential.
Over the next decade, a number of developments followed, although the email system remained relatively simple. In 1988, some widely adopted offline players began to appear. These were, in many ways, the very first email providers or email receivers. Eudora was probably the most used provider in the early years. Pegasus Mail was also among the first providers.
Once the World Wide Web made its appearance, email was able to be used not only through external software but also using web-based email providers. Hotmail was the first of these large providers, went live in 1996 and was eventually acquired by Microsoft. Other early email providers included Excite’s email service and Yahoo!’s email service. In 2004, Google entered the crowded provider arena, innovating the industry with a number of new features and quickly capturing a large market share. Many of the older email providers have since followed in Gmail’s footsteps, implementing larger mailbox sizes, robust searches, and more AJAX-influenced interfaces.
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