InterviewsRaymond Tomlinson: Email Pioneer, Part 2 Dag Spicer (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Courtesy of Raytheon BBN Technologies Raymond (Ray) Tomlinson was a computer engineer best known for developing the TENEX operating system and implementing the first email program on the Arpanet system in 1971. In its official biography, the Internet Hall of Fame states that “Tomlinson’s email program brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate.” The following interview is the second in a two-part Annals series based on an oral history conducted by Marc Weber and Gardner Hendrie for the Computer History Museum (CHM) in June 2009. (For a full transcript, see the CHM archive: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2016/03/102702118-05-01-acc.pdf.) Tomlinson has since passed away, on 5 March 2016. Marc Weber: At the time you created email, did you anticipate how big it would become? Ray Tomlinson: No, not really. I felt that everybody who had access to the network and a computer would have no reason not to use it because it was clearly very useful, but at the time, there was only a small community of people who had that access, maybe 1,000 individuals. What it really took for email to become as universal as it has was the growth of networking in general and the availability of computers. In some sense, one drove the other. There were people who wanted to use applications like email, and for them buying a computer and hooking it up with a modem to a network was an almost essential thing in terms of their business or their approach to how to run their lives. That, of course, led to demand for lower-priced computers and more accessible networking. The fact that then these people were connecting up meant that the community with which you could communicate became that much larger. So instead of 1,000 people you might have 10,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000. As that number grew, it had this regenerative effect in which the demand for computers and networks drove their prices down, because once they existed they became cookie-cutter products that could be turned out with mass production techniques. This developed into an ever-expanding spiral that encompassed more and more people with the ability to use email. Weber: What happened after email? Tomlinson: After email? We could be here all day. There was packet radio work. We had an interesting project for the Post Office called Intelpost that had to do with sending messages, though not email. The idea was to send a document by using a facsimile machine on the input side, route it with TCP messages to other post offices, where there would be another facsimile machine that would turn it back into paper. Then they would carry it via postal carriers to the recipients. It was a way of sending large documents, presumably less expensively and certainly more quickly than they could otherwise. If you wanted to send 10 copies of the same thing (a 10-, 12-, 50-page document such as a contract) to multiple recipients, the Post Office could route it out, distribute it to five or 10 different places with two copies each, and then deliver it within the local area as ordinary mail. The whole idea was that facsimile machines were expensive at the time and that you could get some synergy here by combining it with network capabilities. I think when facsimile machines became much less expensive, though, everybody just did it for themselves. At some point, we also wrote an implementation that incorporated TCP into the TENEX monitor. It worked much the same way as NCP (Network Control Protocol). You open connections and send the traffic. Bill Plummer and I worked on this, and I think he did most of the work. We were using it to connect to a line printer. We had a line printer on one machine that was actually a test vehicle more than anything. Printing things on this printer became a way of testing TCP to see how it’d break when you actually used it for...
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