This Week Brings The 29th Anniversary Of Email

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August 30, 2011 marks the 29th anniversary of email as we know it today. 29 years ago a 16 year old by the name of V. A. Shiva copyrighted “EMAIL” and the GUI we still use including the fields “To: From: Cc: Bcc: Subject: Reply: Reply All: Forward” and of course the body and attachments.

Many people before Shiva may claim to have created email but it was Shiva who brought it from office mail to the first email system. In his words:

…EMAIL is not just  electronic TXT messages.  EMAIL, as stated above, had a very specific meaning.  It had all those important fields, which today we take for granted.  To build EMAIL that an office worker at UMDNJ could use, one had to create a REAL System.  Prior to that, only scientists and technical programmers could send electronic messages. Such as System needed a database, a high-level programming language, redundancy to ensure reliability, an easy-to-use interface, and much more.  That E-MAIL System is what I had the pleasure of building during 1978-1981.

Some experts say that email will eventually be replaced by IM, text messaging, social networking, etc. but Shiva believes otherwise. He looks at Facebook as an example:

“…Even as Zuckerburg declares as some trade journals said, “EMAIL IS DEAD”, he is launching @Facebook as a direct challenge to GMail. He says it will have EMAIL in it, along with other types of “messaging.”

Email, perhaps, is here to stay. Happy birthday email!