First submit: A historical past of on-line public messaging

Folks have been leaving public messages because the first artists painted searching scenes on cave partitions. However it was the invention of electrical energy that eternally modified the best way we talked to one another. In 1844, the primary message was despatched by way of telegraph. Samuel Morse, who created the binary Morse Code many years earlier than digital computer systems have been even attainable, tapped out, “What hath God wrought?” It was a prophetic first submit.

World Conflict II accelerated the invention of digital computer systems, however they have been primarily single-use machines, designed to calculate artillery firing tables or resolve scientific issues. As computer systems received extra highly effective, the thought of time-sharing grew to become engaging. Computer systems have been costly, and so they spent most of their time idle, ready for a consumer to enter keystrokes at a terminal. Time-sharing allowed many individuals to work together with a single laptop on the identical time.

Half 0: The Precambrian period of digital communication (1969–1979)

Quickly after time-sharing was invented, individuals began sending messages to different customers. However since each laptop spoke its personal distinctive machine language and had its personal means of storing and retrieving knowledge, none of those machines might speak to one another. The answer to this downside got here out of the Pentagon’s Superior Analysis Tasks Company (ARPA), and was thus dubbed the “ARPANET.” When two completely different computer systems related to one another by an “IMP” (Interface Message Processor, the primary router) in 1969, it was an enormous breakthrough.

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Now, instead of sending a message to a friend who was probably sitting next to you in the same computer lab, you could send it to someone in a different city. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson wrote the first inter-computer messaging program, SNDMSG. Because he had to differentiate between the receiver’s username and the name of the computer they were using, he needed a character that wouldn’t be part of either. He hit “SHIFT-P” on the Model 33 Teletype, got an @, and the rest was history. Email was born.

The friendly orange glow

At around the same time, a self-contained computer network called PLATO was also changing the world. PLATO was an educational system that began in 1960 and was nearing its fourth iteration. It was responsible for many computer firsts, such as the first flat-screen plasma display, which launched in 1972 with PLATO IV. These touch-enabled, 512×512 graphical displays looked like they came from the future. And while it couldn’t talk to ARPANET, every PLATO user at every terminal could communicate with each other all over the world.

In 1971, PLATO was the home of the first “phishing” scam, when student Mark Rusted created a fake login screen that stole users’ passwords. (He was politely asked not to do it again.) Because of this, the next revision of PLATO added a special keystroke combination, SHIFT-STOP, that would guarantee that the user saw a real login screen. Years later, Microsoft would use the same idea for Windows NT with CTRL-ALT-DEL.