The recent announcement by Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, of "modern messaging" got me thinking about email. Email is struggling now, some say its broken. It takes a lot of our time to clear out unimportant messages, and time wasting ones as well. While it's much faster than its snail mail grandfather, it doesn't always keep up with today's faster paced society. What, wait 15 minutes for a reply? Zuckerberg got the inspiration to create the new integrated feature that allows users to communicate with each other regardless of what they're using... email, chat, text messaging or Facebook.com from asking questions. His conversations with high school students and how they communicate with each other was quite revealing. They don't use email he learned. They find it "too formal" and too slow. They prefer faster, simpler methods of staying in touch such as chat, text messaging and Facebook. But a problem occurs is when you jump from one platform to the other; you lose the context of the last conversation. You have to start all over with a new one on the new platform.
Modern messaging solves this by housing all your conversation history with that person in a "social inbox". Sounds great, but it got me to thinking about email, and how long its been around. Actually, it hasn't been around that long at all. Even Google hasn't been with us that long (1997) even though I can hardly remember how I ever got along without it. So here goes: Email in one form or another has been with us since the early 1960's. Time sharing computers of the day could be programmed to exchange text messages and even real-time chat among users at different terminals. IM in the 60's, who knew? Those systems where "store and forward" systems like current day email systems. Electronic mail predates the creation of the Internet. Actually, it was a critical device in bringing it to life by allowing it's developers (not Al Gore) to collaborate one block of programing at a time.
In 1971 Ray Tomlinson added a program to those early messaging systems that allowed files to be copied over the (closed) network. He chose the commercial @ symbol to extend the addressing to the network "user @ host" is still the standard for email addressing today. Emails sent in the early 1970s look pretty much like ones sent on the net today. Although they weren't sent on open networks available to everyone. In the 1980's a more efficient SMTP protocol was created allowing senders to CC copy an email with more than one a addressee. This made email even more useful for communicating with multiple users. The first sanctioned commercial use occurred in 1988 when MCI Mail was connected to the NSFNET for "experimental use". Then in 1989, the CompuServe mail system also connected to the NSFNET. The beginning of large scale adoption of internet email on a global standard happened when Online Services connected their proprietary American Online (AOL) email systems to the internet in 1993. "You've got Mail" So unless you're a high schooler and commercial email started 4-6 years before you were born, it hasn't really been with us that long. Of course back then you had to wait for the "dial up" system to literally make a phone call over hard wires to connect with the internet servers. OMG... NFW...ILMFAO! [
http://www.linkedin.com/in/randylarrow]Randy Larrow consults with small to medium sized companies in the Wilmington NC area. Randy Larrow consults small to medium sized businesses in North Carolina as a Multi-Media Consultant with LocalEdge, a division of Hearst Media. Using it's unique technologies and experience, LocalEdge nationally has grown exponentially by bringing results-driven technologies to local customers at local prices in a variety of markets.
Relationships with major search engines like Yahoo!, Google Adwords, MSN and Ask.com have enabled us to keep up with the ever changing SEM market. Interactive Marketing any size business may need include: SEM (sponsored text ad campaigns), SEO (search engine optimization), Social Media Marketing such as Facebook & Twitter business pages, Mobile text ads/coupons, as well as established east coast & Texas yellow page directories and local and national direct mail programs.
Article Source: [
http://EzineArticles.com/?Email:-A-Short-History-Of-Where-It-Came-From&id=5388927] Email: A Short History Of Where It Came From
