The Internet

Whether you're an average teenager wanting to keep in touch with friends after school, or a business person needing a low cost but effective way to keep work related material local and secret, chances are you use E-Mail or Instant Messaging services. For communication purposes in this high tech lifestyle that exists today, these systems are used only with the basic understanding needed to run these devices. You are about to learn how these systems came to be and the in depth understanding needed to make them work.

To start with, you must know that they require a system of computers connected to a LAN (Local Area Network) server. The most commonly used and largest LAN server in the world is the Internet. Since the internet hosts the majority of all IM (Instant Messaging) and E-Mail servers, then you must know the beginnings of it.

The Internet's precursor was the ARPANET. The ARPANET was a large wide-area network created by the United States Defense Advanced Research project Agency (ARPA). Established in 1969 ARPANET served as a test-bed for new networking technologies, linking many universities and research centers. The first two nodes that formed the ARPANET were UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute, followed by the University of Utah. Because of his unique expertise in data networking Len Kleinrock would use the technology which by then had come to be known as "packet switching". When TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) was adopted by the ARPANET as its connection for the networks, the Internet was born.

The first email message was sent by Len Kleinrock in 1973. He used the Resource-Sharing Executive program (RSEXEC) to send a message to a man in London that he forgot his razor in his room and to retrieve it while at the international meeting for government funding projects like the ARPANET from other countries. To do so he first had to run the RSEXEC program in his home in Los Angeles and then had to think of a person on the network at 3 A.M. When he did, he put the "where so-and-so" command in and connected his computer to the other so the TALK command would be enabled. RSEXEC opened a split screen window, one to write messages and the other to read. As time passed, this process of using a resource sharing program as a message sending system became widely used.

Later a man named Ray Tomlinson created a message mailing and message reading program. To send messages, you'd use the program "SNDMSG"; to receive/read messages, you'd use the program "READMAIL". Even though Tomlinson was famous for his invention of this two programs his main claim to fame was a decision he made while writing these programs. He needed a way to separate the e-mail address from the username. He wanted a character that would not be used in the username. While looking at the standard keyboard used by most ARPANET users, he chose the @ symbol. Ray did not intend the program to be used on the ARPANET, like most mailbox programs it was intended to be used on local time-sharing systems. It was designed to handle mail locally and not over wide distances.

Stephen Lukasik's, when appointed as head of the agency that ran the ARPANET, first action was to receive an e-mail address and access to the ARPANET on his "portable" computer. He was also one of the very first business men who promoted the idea of using mailbox systems like Tomlinson's for work related communication. During meetings he would use his computer to dial-up his mail to view. Many workers saw this as a way to get the boss' approval on an idea quickly. But by 1973 three quarters of all traffic on ARPANET was e-mail. With the e-mail flow was so large and Lukasik being the boss, his e-mail was piling up in his in-box. The day after talking to Larry Roberts about his e-mail situation, Roberts came in with a bit of code that could show a menu of messages, file messages, or delete them. This program was the very first e-mail manager. Many people on the ARPANET loved Roberts program "RD" for READ. Soon people began to make little tweaks to it and operating systems where flooded with programs such as NRD, WRD, BANANARD, HG, and MAILSYS.

One of the later complications with e-mail were the header wars. The header wars where based on human disagreement on how much information was to be displayed at the head of a message. Of course, many people displayed information in their header that other people would say as too much and considered it to be out of balance with the message. The problem was solved when a regulation was set for the header to only show the 'date' and 'from' categories.

As time past, more people became relaxed on what they said over e-mail and there began to come messages about anti-war including forms of anarchy and disagreements over Nixon's impeachment.

As e-mail systems became large and more complex, separate computers called servers where dedicated to running new e-mail programs some examples would be SMTP, POP3, IMAP.

By 1976 the number of e-mail messages sent compared to the amount of first class mail handled by the Postal Service was still a child compared the Postal Service, but the increasing numbers of e-mail transactions were not going unnoticed. These increasing numbers caused Arthur D. Little to include in his report