Macau Matters | The email pioneer

Richard Whitfield

Ray Tomlinson, the man who created the software to send the first email message between two computers in 1971 died on 5 March 2016 at the age of 74. He was also the person you can thank for defining email addresses as username@computer.domain – he decided that “@” would be a good separator in email addresses.
While some people are starting to argue that email is becoming obsolescent, there are still 2.5 million emails sent every second all round the world. This is far more than the number of Google searches, for example.
He created email while working to develop ARPANET for America’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which was a forerunner to today’s global Internet. Creating email was not formally part of the project to develop ARPANET and Tomlinson implemented it because he thought it was a “neat idea”. Interestingly, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) the organization that now controls the way that the Internet operates globally is meeting in Marrakech in March to agree on a reform that would turn it into a new kind of international organisation. If this goes ahead, a crucial global resource, the internet’s address system, will soon be managed by a body that is largely independent of national governments.
I can remember getting my first Internet email account in the early 1980s while I was studying at Melbourne University, but it was not much use because it was largely an academic system at the time. I can also remember when email addresses started to appear on business cards in Hong Kong in the mid 1990s, and email started to finally become generally useful. I even worked in a company in Hong Kong that helped local businesses set up their own Internet email systems. By 2000 I had stopped mailing letters home to my parents because I had finally convinced my father to get an email account, and we have used email ever since. Nowadays some of my students complain that I do not have a WeChat account and I do not use facebook messaging, but I still prefer email.
For all its problems, email has truly revolutionized global communications. It is nowadays rare for businesses or individuals to “put pen to paper” and send a written document by mail, and the business of mail services around the world is increasingly delivering packages, not letters. Telex has largely disappeared, and even the fax has mostly come and gone. Governments are also using letters less and less to communicate with citizens – I get an SMS from the Macau government when I break a road rule and then check the nature of my infraction through a website. No letter in the mail.
So, one man’s “neat idea” included in a US military project to create a packet switched communications network that could survive a nuclear war has evolved to become a huge global network used by billions of people every day. Who would have thought?

An undated photo provided by Raytheon BBN Technologies shows Raymond Tomlinson