The Internet delivered e-mail - that other great social and business phenomenon of the last few years.
Since the late 1990s e-mail has started to reach every area of our lives, transforming the way we organise our work and social time.
Up to 50 million people are using e-mail worldwide. Not all that many yet, but the number is still doubling every two years. The growth of e-mail traffic has been even more rapid. There were around 2,000 million e-mails sent during 1998. By 2001 the annual traffic had grown six fold to around 12 billion - and it's still increasing at about 50 per cent a year.
One of the founding firms of ARPANET and the Internet was a company called BBN. In late 1971 a BBN engineer called Ray Tomlinson invented an e-mail program that allowed users to exchange messages across a distributed network.
In 1972 Tomlinson modified his e-mail program to run on ARPANET where it became a quick hit. Tomlinson chose the @ sign from the punctuation keys on his Model 33 Teletype - because it meant 'at'. The same year Larry Roberts wrote the first e-mail management program to list, selectively read, file, forward and respond to messages.
Before Dialcom and Telecom Gold, in the late 1980s, there was another e-mail type system in Britain, which allowed users to compose their messages on electric typewriters in one office, to be printed out on another machine in a far away location. The PC or computer terminal had yet to arrive on office desks.
The idea was developed because manufacturers wanted to transform the old-fashioned teleprinters into more sophisticated communicating devices. Unfortunately no research was done into demand and the manufacturers were not prepared to promote the product themselves. Very soon e-mail using computer terminals was introduced, and Teletex was superseded.
British Telecom entered the electronic mail market in 1982 with Telecom Gold, operated under licence from the American service provider Dialcom (which BT went on to acquire in 1986). This was an e-mail service that aimed to integrate with telex and fax - the dominant business communications devices of the time.
By the end of the eighties, PC-based e-mail was showing signs of taking off in the USA, and Telecom Gold had gained competitors in the form of Easylink and One to One.
None of these pioneer services was a commercial success, simply because Britain was not yet ready for e-mail.
The cost was high and users had to battle with user-hostile software and crawlingly slow modem speeds of 1200bit/s maximum.
In April 1979 Kevin MacKenzie e-mailed his fellow subscribers at MsgGroup, an early Internet bulletin board, with a suggestion to put some emotion back into the dry text medium of e-mail.
For example, he wrote, you could use a hyphen and a closing bracket thus -) to indicate that the sentence you'd just written was tongue-in-cheek. Though 'flamed' (criticised) by many at the time, emoticons soon caught on and became widely used.
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