1971

E-mail

In the winter of 1971 Ray Tomlinson, an engineer for BBN, has a brilliant idea: wouldn’t it be great if one could send electronic messages from one place to another across the existing network? He thought it was a really good idea, since this electronic mail could be much faster than regular mail.
E-Mail

E-Mail

This idea doesn’t let him go, so Tomlinson starts working. Just six hours later he is finished. During these six hours Tomlinson manages to write the first program which enables the writing, reading and sending of electronic messages. But he has a problem, addressing. He knows of which parts the address should consist, but he doesn’t know how to separate them properly. The first part of the address should consist of the name of the recipient and the last part should be the name of the computer, which receives the electronic mail. It has to be a symbol, that can be found on a keyboard, and is not part of a family or company name – no letter, no number. Tomlinson chooses the symbol “@”. Only a few minutes later, Tomlinson writes himself the first e-mail, from one computer in his room to the other. His address was: tomlinson@bbntenexa

1971

Net
Facts

There are already 15 nodes with 23 hosts on the ARPANET: UCLA (Los Angeles) , SRI (Stanford), UCSB (Santa Barbara, CA), University of Utah, BBN (Massachusetts), MIT (Massachusetts), RAND (Santa Monica, CA), SDC (System Development Corporation, Santa Monica), Harvard (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Lincoln Lab (Massachusetts), Stanford , UIU(C) (University of Illinois), CWRU (Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio), CMU, NASA/Ames (Sunnyvale, California).

TIPs (Terminal IMP) are available. One TIP allows 63 “dumb terminals” access to the ARPANET (now weak computers can exchange data as well).

1971

Other
Events

The USA, Great Britain and the USSR sign a treaty which outlaws the use of nuclear weapons on the ocean floor.

The People's Republic of China becomes member of the UN and replaces the Republic of China's (Taiwan) seat on the United Nations Security Council.

The Soviet astronautics suffer a big set-back when three cosmonauts are found dead in their space-capsule after their return.

Due to a weak dollar a world currency crisis begins.