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Editor Bio
Gregg Mayer is a journalist and lawyer with a keen interest in the rapidly evolving world of e-Discovery. Gregg has published numerous articles, including writing for law journals and the American Bar Association. Gregg served as editor-in-chief of the Mississippi Law Journal. Before practicing law, Gregg worked as a newspaper reporter for six years.
From ‘Qwerty’ Email To 170 Billion Email Messages A Day
Posted by Gregg Mayer on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
Email was invented in 1971. The first message said something like “Qwerty,” according to Ray Tomlinson, the inventor who never imagined email would grow as rapidly as it has.
One problem he had with the first e-mail program was finding a way to separate the person to whom one was addressing a message from the computer or network they were using – which he solved with the symbol @.
It could just as easily have been a square bracket or even a comma that would come to be typed in every e-mail address, “but they were already being used, and of the characters that were left, @ was best. Plus it conveyed a sense of place, which seemed to suit.”
It took another 20 years – until the advent of the world wide web in the early nineties - before e-mail became widespread, but Mr. Tomlinson said that the basic characteristics of most modern e-mail programs – commands for deleting, replying and forwarding, and folders – were in place back then. “They’ve just become a lot bigger and bulkier nowadays.”
Read the rest of Tomlinson’s recent interview with TimesOnline here.
Posted in: Electronically Stored Information
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