When was the first email message sent?
According to IBM, the first email message happened in 1971, but who was behind the promotion of this new tool was Ray Tomlinson, who used the experimental CYPNET protocol to send messages over the network, which until then only communicated to users. users of the same computer.
Tomlinson created the first email program on the ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet, and in fact it is thanks to him that we use the at symbol, since the system was based on ARPANet, since it became necessary to specify a user and a destination . The reason for choosing this symbol was that in English the at sign is read “at” (in Spanish en).
In fact, Tomlinson received the Prince of Asturias Award for Scientific Research in 2009, together with the creator of the mobile phone, Martin Cooper. In 2012 he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, who recognized his invention.
a computer career
After starting to use this type of tool to do research, Microsoft decided to launch commercial email software called Microsoft Mail in 1988. This was a worldwide revolution, achieving half a million accounts created worldwide that same year.
After this milestone, in 1999 it had managed to reach 40 million users and after the appearance of Hotmail, in 1996 the email race was unstoppable. On April 1, 2004, Google introduced its email service, Gmail. Since 2012 this option is the most used email service in the world, according to Statista.