Ray Tomlinson has passed away. Mainstream obituaries are going to focus on his being “the creator of email” or “the sender of the first email” or “the inventor of the @ sign in email addresses“. All of which are true. He did send the first (networked) email. He did use the (otherwise mostly unused on TENEX) @ sign to separate user and host. But he did a lot of...
The Mary Litynski Award is presented by M3AAWG to people who have done extensive work outside the public eye over a significant period of time. At the Dublin conference the award was presented to Rodney Joffe. A lot of other people will talk about Rodney’s accomplishments, including his role in the founding of Genuity, his work with the DMA in the early days of spam, his efforts against SMS...
Thirty years ago this Sunday, symbolics.com was registered – the first .com domain. It was followed, within a few months, by bbn.com, think.com, mcc.com and dec.com. Symbolics made lisp machines – symbolics.com is now owned by a domain speculator. BBN is a technology R&D company who’ve worked on everything. If I had to pick one thing they were involved with it’d be the...
Who didn’t invent email? Shiva Ayyadurai. He’s not the only one – I didn’t invent email either, nor did Abraham Lincoln, Boadicea or Tim Berners-Lee. So why mention Shiva? He claims that in 1978 when he was 14, he took some courses in programming. His mum worked for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and one of her colleagues challenged him to write an...
The history of long distance communication is a fascinating, and huge, subject. I’m going to focus just on the history of network email – otherwise I’m going to get distracted by AUTODIN and semaphore and facsimile and all sorts of other telegraphy. Electronic messaging between users on the same timesharing computer was developed fairly soon after time-sharing computer systems...
Many aspects of email are a lot older than you may think. There were quite a few people in the early 1970s working out how to provide useful services using ARPANET, the network that evolved over the next 10 or 15 years into the modern Internet. They used Requests for Comment (RFCs) to document protocol and research, much as is still done today. Here are some of the interesting milestones. April...
The arrival of my first spam email was a bit of a shock. I’d been on the internet for years by that point and had never seen junk mail in my inbox. Of course, the Internet was a very different place. The web was still a toddler. There was no email marketing industry. In fact, there wasn’t much commerce on the web at all. Much of the “surfing” I did was using gopher and ftp...
I was doing some research about the evolution of the this-is-spam button for a blog article. In the middle of it, I found an old NY Times report about spam from 2003. At the same time, the argument is intensifying over what represents legitimate e-mail, particularly when it ends up being blocked by an antispam filter. Last November, AOL threatened to block e-mail from Gap. Even though Gap said it...
It might just be random 17th Century punctuation, but this poem from 1648 certainly seems to be using a smiley face emoji.
(OK, it’s probably not intentional, but it’s lovely intersection of the emoji and the word.)
A couple of days ago an ex-employee of Opt-In Inc., was kind enough to do a Reddit AMA answering questions about their experience working with Steve Hardigree in the “legitimate” email marketing industry, back in the early 2000s. The whole thing is worth a read, but I thought I’d share some of his more interesting answers here. Everyone knows everyone The spam business was super...
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