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on a piece of software to be used to compose and send mail, called “send
message.” And it seemed like an interesting hack to tie those two together to
use the file-transfer program to send the mail to the other machine. So that's
what I did. I spent not a whole lot of time, maybe two or three weeks, putting
that together and it worked.
28
Note Tomlinson's uncritical use of the word
hack:
in these early days it was a
term of respect for some technically clever programming exploit. To be called a
“hacker” was a compliment and did not have the unfavorable connotations the
word now has. Once email between different sites became possible, Kahn said,
“It had tremendous benefits: overcoming the obstacles of time zones, messag-
ing multiple recipients, transferring materials with messages, simple collegial
and friendly contacts.”
29
Use of email grew rapidly and completely transformed
the nature of collaboration. In an early experiment, an email sent to 130 people
all around the United States at 5
P.M.
generated seven responses within ninety
minutes and twenty-eight responses in twenty-four hours. Such a response
time now seems very slow, but in the 1970s it was revolutionary.
Tomlinson also got to choose a symbol for designating email addresses: his
choice has become an icon for the networked world. Tomlinson needed a sym-
bol to separate the name of the user from the machine that the user was using.
He said: “The one that was most obvious was the '@' sign, because this person
was @ this other computer, or, in some sense, he was @ it. He was in the same
room with it anyway. And so it seemed fairly obvious and I just chose it.”
30
Although email usage took off like wildfire, there was much debate about
the need to establish a separate email transmission protocol that was indepen-
dent of FTP. In 1975, the first electronic discussion group called MsgGroup was
established. The group had many heated online debates about email headers
and requests for comments, and the practice of email
flaming,
, sending an angry,
critical, or abusive email, became an occasional feature of this and other dis-
cussion groups.
From Hawaii to the Ethernet
Taylor's original vision for personal computing at Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center (PARC) had always included networking the Alto machines
in a local area network, or LAN. The networking technology needed to be
cheap - Taylor's goal was it should cost no more than 5 percent of the cost of
the computers they were connecting. The technology also needed to be easily
expandable, capable of linking hundreds of Altos. Researcher Bob Metcalfe
(
B.10.15
) arrived at PARC in the summer of 1972 still smarting from the indig-
nity of having his doctoral thesis turned down by Harvard as being “insuffi-
ciently theoretical.”
31
While at Harvard, he had spent much of his time at MIT
working on the ARPANET, and he had written up this very practical work for
his thesis. At PARC, Metcalfe found several experimental networking projects
in progress, but he believed that none of them would satisfy Taylor's require-
ments. There was also a deadline looming: in his design for the Alto hardware,
Chuck Thacker had left space for a yet-to-be-designed
network controller card
,
a device to connect the Alto to a computer network, and PARC was nearly
B.10.15. Bob Metcalfe and David
Boggs invented and built a LAN
technology that they called Ethernet
to link up the PARC Altos and
Gary Starkweather's laser printer.
Metcalfe later left PARC to found
3Com, a computer networking
company, with the three Cs standing
for computers, communication, and
compatibility.
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