How long has there been email? Overview of origins

Today, almost nothing works without email. Since when this form of communication exists, only the somewhat older semesters know, if at all. Reason enough for us to take a closer look at the history of email.

Email - a revolutionary idea

What many do not know: E-mail is older than the Internet, which we use every day.

• The World Wide Web in its current form has only existed since 1989. Before that there was the so-called "Arpanet" (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which was reserved for the military.
• This Arpanet was developed by the U.S. research firm Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense.
• One of the computer technicians involved was Ray Tomlinson. During his work in 1971, Tomlinson developed email more as a by-product or a gimmick. Neither he nor anyone else recognized the potential of this invention at the time.
• He just wanted to send a file from one computer to another. To differentiate between the addressee and the computer, Tomlinson used the "@" character as a separator. The simple reason: this sign does not appear in the written language.
• How little attention this revolutionary invention had even for the inventor himself at the time is shown by a statement Tomlinson made to a colleague. "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on." In German: "Don't tell anyone! It's not what we're supposed to be working on." Finally, the job was to develop the Arpanet.
• The e-mail system has been developed to this day, but the basic principle is still the same.
• In Germany, by the way, the first email did not arrive until August 3, 1984. The message came from the US University of Cambridge, recipient was Michael Rotert from the University of Karlsruhe. The subject was "Welcome to CSNET".