[ih] First E-Mail ?

[Dave Crocker]

On 11/1/2019 10:58 AM, Jorge Amodio wrote:
> 
> Checking with the “Elders” the veracity of a recent article in local news about Ben Barker (a San Antonian) sent the first E-Mail Oct 1st, 1969.
> 
> Can anybody confirm that?
> 
> My recollection is that Ray Tomlinson was the first one to send an E-Mail through ARPANet.


Looks like the article you are getting this from is:

 
https://www.expressnews.com/lifestyle/article/Meet-the-San-Antonio-man-who-sent-the-first-email-14574855.php

or the like.  It's impressively confused.

A separate article I found, with much better grasp of the historical 
details, says that Barker did debugging on the IMP.

As for the the confused article's errors, one example is that the guy 
who did the typing at UCLA was Charlie Kline.  More importantly, the 
things being sent and received between IMPs were messages, but they 
weren't email.  They were at an architectural level quite a large 
technical step below email.

For various write-ups about early email, take a look at:

      http://emailhistory.org

Relevant tidbits:

      1. There is no definitive reference to the first email, but a 
common person to cite is Tom van Vleck and a common timeframe is 1965. 
Relative to email history, this /was/ email but it was within a single 
machine.

      2. What Ray Tomlinson did, at the end of 1971, was to make email 
go between machines.  He took existing email creation software (sndmsg) 
and hacked it to allow specifying a remote host system for the 
recipient's mailbox -- hence mailbox at host -- and had sndmsg use an 
existing file transfer mechanism between the systems.

d/
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