I’M STANDING in the lab where, in 1971, the first email was sent. Programmer Ray Tomlinson’s SENDMSG allowed a user on one of four fridge-sized PDP-10 computers to send a plain-text message to a user on any of the others. It was a frivolous trick at the time – the computers that first ran SENDMSG were within shouting distance of one another. But that network, dubbed ARPANET, went down in history as the first step towards the global internet we have today.
Now lab 2/177 at BBN Technologies of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is humming to a different tune – the sound of…
