What Were the First Email Providers?
Determining who the early email providers were is actually a bit trickier than it appears. Email itself has amorphous beginnings, as it was a natural evolution from file systems to the type of email we’re familiar with today. Depending on how one defines email, the earlier providers could go back as far as 1965. In the early days of computing, something akin to modern email developed naturally. Different users who worked on the same workstation usually had their own individual directories, to store their various working files. Colleagues who wanted to leave them a message, then, might write a message and leave it in their friend’s personal directory, so they would see it the next time they logged on to the system. While a far cry from modern email providers, this was none the less a sort of electronic mail. In many ways, it was akin to leaving a letter at someone’s front door, rather than giving it to a post office to deliver. The first of these early email providers was at the Massach
Determining who the early email providers were is actually a bit trickier than it appears. Email itself has amorphous beginnings, as it was a natural evolution from file systems to the type of email we’re familiar with today. Depending on how one defines email, the earlier providers could go back as far as 1965. In the early days of computing, something akin to modern email developed naturally. Different users who worked on the same workstation usually had their own individual directories, to store their various working files. Colleagues who wanted to leave them a message, then, might write a message and leave it in their friend’s personal directory, so they would see it the next time they logged on to the system. While a far cry from modern email providers, this was none the less a sort of electronic mail. In many ways, it was akin to leaving a letter at someone’s front door, rather than giving it to a post office to deliver. The first of these early email providers was at the M
