SNDMSG was an early electronic mail program, chiefly notable because it was used to send what is considered the first networked email.
SNDMSG was originally the electronic mail program for a single multi-user time-sharing computer running the
TENEX operating system. It allowed all users of the machine to send a simple form of email to each other, but it was extended by
Ray Tomlinson
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson (April 23, 1941 – March 5, 2016) was an American computer programmer who implemented the first email program on the ARPANET system, the precursor to the Internet, in 1971; It was the first system able to send mail be ...
in 1971 to allow sending to users on other computers accessible over the
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...
, addressing them by appending the other system's host name after an "@" sign.
"The First E-mail Message of Ray Tomlinson"
history-computer.com/[RFC 498]
References
See also
* Delivermail
The ancestor of sendmail, delivermail, also by Eric Allman, is a mail transport agent that used the FTP protocol on the early ARPANET to transmit e-mail to the recipient. Due to deficiencies in using FTP to send e-mail, a new protocol was created ...
* History of email
The history of email entails an evolving set of technologies and standards that culminated in the email systems in use today.
Computer-based messaging between users of the same system became possible following the advent of time-sharing in the ear ...
* Sendmail
Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet.
A descendant of the ...
Message transfer agents
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