Technology History | 10 Moulton Street — The First Network Email Travelled About Fifteen Feet

The two machines were standing next to each other, and the message between them went by way of a national network.

Ray Tomlinson worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman, the Cambridge firm building the ARPANET's routers, and in late 1971 he was writing systems software for TENEX on Digital PDP-10s.

He took SNDMSG, a program for leaving a note in another user's mailbox on the same machine, and joined it to a file-transfer program so a message could reach a user on a different host.

Addressing it needed a character that could never appear inside a person's name, and on his Model 33 Teletype keyboard he picked the at sign.

Then he sent test messages to himself, from one PDP-10 to the other, across the room.

By his own account the two machines were literally side by side, and the only connection between them apart from the floor was the ARPANET.

The famous part of this story is the part that is not true.

QWERTYUIOP is quoted everywhere as the text of the first email, and Tomlinson said repeatedly that he could not remember what he typed, only that the messages were tests and entirely forgettable.

None of them was kept.

The date is soft as well. Most accounts say late 1971, some narrow it to November or December, and Hafner and Lyon's history of the internet puts the moment in 1972.

The at sign carried a cost he had not foreseen.

On Multics, a rival time-sharing system, it was the line-erase character, so typing an address there wiped the whole input line — and Tomlinson said he was reminded of that only afterwards.

His own address was tomlinson@bbn-tenexa, which is recognisably the format still in use more than fifty years later.

What is worth holding onto is the shape of the thing.

Local mail already existed on time-sharing machines, so the invention was not the mailbox; it was making a message survive the trip to a different computer, and giving it an address that said which one.

BBN still occupies 10 Moulton Street, now part of RTX, and it is a working office rather than a museum.

Photo: the two machines themselves, photographed at BBN around 1970. Tomlinson identified this picture as showing the pair the first network email passed between, which is why a fairly ordinary machine-room snapshot is the right image for this entry.

Sources: Tomlinson's own published recollection and NPR's memorial interview; the Wikimedia file description quoting him directly; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late.

Photo: unknown photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.