Determining who the first email providers were is actually a bit more complicated than it seems. Email itself has an amorphous beginning, as it was a natural evolution from file systems to the type of email we are familiar with today. Depending on how email is defined, earlier providers could date back to 1965.
Hotmail was launched in 1996 and is considered to be the first major email provider.
In the early days of computing, something like modern email developed naturally. Different users working on the same workstation often had their own individual directories to store their various work files. Colleagues who wanted to leave a message for them could write a message and leave it in their friends’ home directory, for them to see the next time they logged on to the system.
The first email providers were at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1965.
Although very different from modern email providers, it was still a type of email. In many ways, it was like leaving a letter at someone’s front door instead of delivering it to the post office for delivery. The first of these early providers was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1965. It was simply called MAILBOX.
In the early 1970s, computers evolved a bit. Instead of everyone working on isolated mainframes that couldn’t communicate, they could now communicate from computer to computer. This meant that it was a bit more complex to send a message to someone than just putting it in their home directory, because you also had to identify which computer the person was on. To facilitate this, some kind of easy addressing system was needed. In 1972, a man named Ray Tomlinson, working for the ARPANET, the predecessor of the modern Internet, created something very similar to modern email.
Tomlinson decided to use the @ symbol to separate the username from its host computer. Using this token methodology, anyone on a network could be addressed simply using the format name@computer. This simple “trick”, as already described, would have a revolutionary contribution. The ability to easily communicate over the ARPANET via email made it incredibly useful to the military personnel who were doing its development. Not only that, but it was something that obviously had a civilian use. This small development in 1975 meant that email accounted for more than three-quarters of the ARPANET’s traffic and that people in the outside world were beginning to get excited about its potential.
Over the next decade several advances occurred, although the email system remained relatively simple. In 1988, some widely adopted offline readers began to appear. These were, in many ways, the first real email providers or email recipients. Eudora was probably the most widely used of these providers in the early years. Pegasus Mail was also among the first providers.
After the World Wide Web appeared, email could be used not only through external software, but also through web-based email providers. Hotmail was the first of these major providers, launched in 1996 and eventually acquired by Microsoft. Other early email providers included the Excite email service and the Yahoo! email service. In 2004, Google entered the crowded vendor arena, innovating the field with a host of new features and rapidly acquiring a large market share. Since then, many of the older email providers have followed in Gmail’s footsteps, implementing larger mailboxes, robust search, and more AJAX-influenced interfaces.
One of the earliest email providers was used at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s.
