October 2nd is email’s birthday. The history of the emergence of electronic mailboxes dates back to the time when a personal computer could only be dreamed of, namely in the second half of the 20th century. At that time, computers were the size of an average room, cost a lot of money, 2-3 people worked on them at once, and the largest network was called ARPANET. It was between such “giants” that the first e-mail worked.

It all started in 1965, when employees of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed the MAIL program based on the CTSS operating platform. Using the program, users of one “main” computer could exchange short messages. These messages were stored in a special “MAIL BOX” folder.

There is a version that e-mail appeared 6 years after these events. In 1971, programmer Ray Tomlinson developed a program that worked on the basis of the CypNet algorithm and was able to send messages to remote “machines”. These messages also ended up in the aforementioned inbox. After the release of this program, Tomlinson developed the electronic address system, according to which each computer user was given an individual address consisting of his name and the name of the computer. These components were separated by the @ symbol, which is still an indispensable component of e-mails.