In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, an engineer working on the ARPANET project — the predecessor to the Internet — sent the first email. The message was nothing profound; it was a series of random characters that looked more like the utterance of a toddler on a typewriter than a groundbreaking moment in technology. But that’s precisely what it was. In its nascent s…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Joan’s Index to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.