Who is the father of electronic mail?

Answer 1

Ray Tomlinson is considered the father of electronic mail, at least for email sent from one computer to another. That was in 1971; messages were sent via the ARPAnet between users on BBNA and BBNB, using the SNDMSG program. Sharing messages between users logged in on the same computer had been around for some years prior to that, but it isn't clear that you can call it "mail" if it never left the same computer memory. The CTSS MAIL command was proposed in an undated Programming Staff Note 49 by Louis Pouzin, Glenda Schroeder, and Pat Crisman. The CTSS team was then working on the design of a new, improved file system for CTSS with many additional features. Numerical sequence places the note in either Dec 64 or Jan 65. PSN 49 proposed a facility for the system operators so they could inform users when lost files were retrieved from tape, by sending a message to a file in their directory.

Noel looking out window

Noel Morris, Jun 68

I was a new member of the MIT programming staff in spring 1965. When I read the PSN document about the proposed CTSS MAIL command, I asked "where is it?" and was told there was nobody available to write it. My colleague Noel Morris and I wrote a version of MAIL for CTSS in the summer of 1965. Noel was the one who saw how to use the features of the new CTSS file system to send the messages, and I wrote the actual code that interfaced with the user. The CTSS manual writeup and the source code of MAIL are available online.

My design contribution to electronic mail was that the original PSN described a limited facility for the CTSS machine operators to notify users when requests to retrieve lost files were completed. I argued successfully for a general facility that let any user send text messages to any other, with any content, instead of a special-purpose command controlled from the 7094 console switches.

MAIL was a privileged command, that could do things normal user programs could not: it used the call (shown in MAD)

Answer 2

There is no "father". It is a cumulative effort of many people. The transistor has advanced electronics as much as anything else has but that also was a cumulative effort at Bell Labs. Without the original pioneers, we would still be discovering the rules, but they would have been discovered. We build upon our predecessors' knowledge base. Bill Gates didn't invent the computer but he helped advance the technology as did Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,

Answer 3

it was a man named Edwin Davis N'Orleski.

Answer 4

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