In this section:
· Who was Tomlinson? · When did he invented electronic mail? · Why? ·
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The first electronic-mail delivery engaging two machines was done one day in 1972 by a quiet engineer, Ray Tomlinson at BBN.
Sometime earlier, Tomlinson had written a mail program for Tenex, the BBN-grown operating system that, by now, was running on most of the ARPANET's PDP-10 machines.
The mail program was written in two parts: To send messages, you'd use a program called SNDMSG; to receive mail, you'd use the other part called READMAIL. He hadn't actually intended for the program to be used on the ARPANET. Like other mailbox programs of the day it was created for time-sharing systems and designed only to handle mail locally, within individual PDP-10s, not across them.
But Tomlinson, an inveterate experimenter, decided to take advantage of having two PDP-10 computers set up in the Cambridge office; in fact, they were the same machines BBN was using to connect to the ARPANET. Weeks earlier, Tomlinson had written an experimental file-transfer protocol called CPYNET. Now he modified the program so that it could carry a mail message from one machine and drop it into a file on another. When he tried it, and sent mail from one PDP-10 to the other, the little hack worked, and even though his mail hadn't actually gone out onto the open network, it had crossed an important historical divide.
Tomlinson's CPYNET hack was a breakthrough; now there was nothing holding e-mail back from crossing the wider Net. Although in technical terms Tomlinson's program was trivial, culturally it was revolutionary. " SNDMSG opened the door," said Dave Crocker, an e-mail pioneer who was a member of the technical support staff in UCLA's computer science department. "It created the first interconnectivity, then everyone took it from there."
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