Before the WWW, back on ARPANET, email was responsible for over 70 per cent of all network traffic, making it an even more important cog in the Web's story.
Electronic messages date back to the time-sharing terminals of the 1960s, but the first landmark step towards today's email was made when computer programmer Ray Tomlinson sent the first "network email" (between more than one machine, as opposed to messages sent between single terminals) using a program he wrote called SNDMSG. Tomlinson was also responsible for introducing the "@" symbol into the email standard.
Email was developed gradually throughout the 1970s before a global standard was agreed in the early 90s. It was during this development that Her Majesty The Queen, best known for owning small dogs and having a large house in London, sent her first email from an Army base. It marked the internet's newly perceived importance and potential as a global game-changer.
The first unsolicited email advertisement was sent from one employee — Gary Thuerk — of DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation, inventor of the minicomputer) to 400 other users of ARPANET. It promoted DEC's new range of System-20 minicomputers, asking recipients to pop along to a product demonstration.
Hotmail was the first major Web-based email provider, conceptualised by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in 1995, launched in 1996, and bought by Microsoft in 1997 for $400m. The deal is a massive milestone in modern communicative history and extended what was previously only available behind an internet service provider to any user on any networked computer in the world
By 2004, Hotmail offered users of its free email service just 2MB of storage, while Yahoo offered 4MB. So when Google announced it was launching a free email service with 1GB of storage, a News.com reader wrote "This sounds like an April Fool's joke if I've ever heard one". In their defence, it was 1 April. But it sparked a paradigm shift in the free email world, with major Web-based email providers now providing gigabytes of storage as standard.
The internet has always been a sociable place, whether you wanted to talk about movies and software, or techniques for ensnaring midgets for bondage picnics. Our choices for this section highlight the importance conversation has had as the Net developed.
Before any online chat service used today, there was Usenet, and it still exists. In some ways one of the first peer-to-peer systems, Usenet was, and is, a vast discussion service, and the precursor to every Web-based message board and Internet Relay Chat application used around the globe.
Where discussions were called "conferences", The Well was the intellectual watering hole and the hub of intelligent debate for over two decades. Luring in the world's geeks, futurists, philosophers and debate-lovers from all walks of life, it started life as a BBS, but now hosts a more modest community via the Web. Notably, the EFF's founders met through the service, and it was a highly respected, influential community in its heyday.
A Department of Information Processing Science employee at the University of Oulu, Finland, Jarkko Oikarinen created the IRC client with the desire to expand upon the popular BBS systems, in order to facilitate real-time chat. In less than 12 months, IRC had proliferated across the globe, running on around 40 servers.
Almost a decade before Skype released its first client, an Israeli company called VocalTec released Internet Phone, which is regarded as the first commercial VoIP application for desktop computers. We were all rocking dial-up modems at this point, but the software's ability to deal with slow connections and internet packet loss helped it pave the way for VoIP to hit the mainstream.
Although not the first instance of real-time chat via computer terminals, ICQ was the first global, GUI-based instant messaging client, and its popularity exploded in the late 90s. It was created by another Israeli company, Mirabilis, and was quickly acquired by AOL in 1998 for just over $400m, despite the fact that AOL ran its own IM network, AOL Messenger.
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So, did you zdnet journos cut your teeth at one of murdoch's tabloids? If Rob McCool developed the Http daemon in the mid-70s then he was a child genius. Simply look him up on wikipedia and you'll see he was born in 1973. Plus, if he did write it in the mid-70s why isn't he the so-called "father of the web" - I', surprised you lot haven't changed history and decided gates invented the internet - muppets!