What did Ray Tomlinson want to do?

With billions of people all over the world sending emails every day, both at work and personally, we tend to take for granted this method of communication and consider email as an inherent part of our modern digital lives. In reality, however, email is a relatively recent luxury. We have Ray Tomlinson to thank for initiating the incredible new era of communication that we now enjoy – he sent the first email in 1971. Tomlinson was born in New York, USA, in 1941. He started his impressive working career as a computer engineer. No one asked him to invent email – it was something that Tomlinson was working on as a personal side project. Email began as an experiment to see if two computers could exchange a message. The concept of sending another person a message through a computer was not invented by Tomlinson because computer scientists had been exchanging messages on machines for years. Yet these previous forms of electronic communication only allowed people to send messages to other users of the same computer or to numbered mailboxes where the messages had to be printed out. Tomlinson wanted to send messages to people, not mailboxes, so he decided to modify and combine the programmes that were already out there. Speaking to The Verge in 2012, Tomlinson said, 'There was no really good way to leave messages for people. The telephone worked up to a point, but someone had to be there to receive the call. And if it wasn't the person you wanted to get, it was an administrative assistant or an answering service. That was the sort of mechanism you had to go through to leave a message, so everyone obsessed with the idea that you could leave messages on the computer.' Email was initially seen as a speedy way for programmers and researchers to keep in touch—particularly targeted at those who can’t be relied on to answer their phones. Tomlinson was frequently asked what the first message was and to many people’s disappointment he said. 'The test messages were entirely forgettable, and I have, therefore, forgotten them.'