On August 30th, 29 years ago, V. A. Shiva copyrighted “EMAIL” after he invented the interface we still use today with the fields “To: From: Cc: Bcc: Subject: Reply, Reply All, Forward” as well as an EMAIL body and attachment.
For this anniversary, V. A. Shiva designed the infographic below depicting the History of Email and Growth of Email Accounts.
As V. A Shiva states on his website “Starting in 1978, I began creating the first EMAIL system while 14-years old, at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ). In fact the term “Electronic Mail”, “EMAIL” itself was a new term. The two words, “Electronic” and “EMAIL” juxtaposed together for me originally brought images of vaporizing paper and somehow transporting it across electrical wires, like the transporter in Star Trek. ”
30 years later he now teaches a class at MIT called “Systems Visualization,” which, maybe unsurprising is oversubscribed.
Read more about V.A Shiva’s story of inventing email here: http://www.vashiva.com/inventing_email.asp and be sure to come to emailexpert.org for our interview with the inventor of email, next week.
After reading through this blog, I never truly realized how e-mail got started. I actually did reports in college on the history of the Internet and how it was started and not once did the fantastic display of information regarding e-mail come up in the sources I cited for my report. Thank you for sharing this infographic, got a great break down of the history. It is very amazing to notice the difference in subscribers by every other year.