The History of Email - The Origin of Email
Looking back over the technological advances that have most changed the way that humans communicate both socially and in a working environment, there is no more significant development than that of email. What is taken for granted now, the instant message that can be both text, images and can even include more content has been a long time in development to reach what it is today, and those who first came up with the idea of email cannot have envisioned how much it would change how everyone communicates.
Communication over long distances has come on significantly in the twentieth century, and from the basis of a telegraph based communication through the cables, and subsequently communication through radio waves, but it was in the aftermath of the Second World War that the origins of email lie, and there are sites such as EPostUnion.com which has gone into great detail in their examination of how email moved from a practical solution for a small number of people to a worldwide communication medium.
The first file sharing system was demonstrated in 1961 by the developers at MIT, where users could connect to an IBM host computer through a dial up connection, and then store and share files with other users who would connect to that same host computer. Four years later advancements were added to that system that would allow users connecting to that system to send messages to other users, and this is how email was created.
As with so many other technological developments, as various electronic mail systems were created and developed, finding a common ground was often difficult, with users having to have the same mail programs as the people receiving the mail for it to work successfully. This led to a glut of third party programs which would convert messages from one format to another allowing for communication between the users of different systems.
Fortunately, this incompatibility between various systems was soon to become a thing of the past, with a standardisation of the email message format in the early 1980s, with a header and message body becoming the norm. From this system comes the identifiable email system that we have today, allowing swift exchanges of messages and content.
Since that email system then became the norm, the use has increased significantly since then, and along with this highly convenient method of communication comes the problems that have developed with modern email. Sales messages and fraudulent messages have become the norm for many email accounts, with the volume of 'Spam' messages becoming a massive burden on the email system that was designed to make communication easier.
Looking back at the origins of email these days, it is impossible to envision that those visionaries could even imagine what their creation would go on to do, with the unwanted developments becoming a hazard that would threaten to damage the communication medium that was designed to make everything so much easier for people. The scientists at MIT cannot have thought what they were doing would change the world, but that is certainly what email has achieved.