The 50 most significant moments of Internet history

By Nate Lanxon on 25 September 2008, 4:02pm

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Before the WWW, back on ARPANET, email was responsible for over 70 per cent of all network traffic, making it an even more important cog in the Web's story.

Electronic messages date back to the time-sharing terminals of the 1960s, but the first landmark step towards today's email was made when computer programmer Ray Tomlinson sent the first 'network email' (between more than one machine, as opposed to messages sent between single terminals) using a program he wrote called SNDMSG. Tomlinson was also responsible for introducing the '@' symbol into the email standard.

Email was developed gradually throughout the 1970s before a global standard was agreed in the early 90s. It was during this development that Her Majesty The Queen, best known for owning small dogs and having a large house in London, sent her first email from an Army base. It marked the Internet's newly perceived importance and potential as a global game-changer.

The first unsolicited email advertisement was sent from one employee -- Gary Thuerk -- of DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation, inventor of the minicomputer) to 400 other users of ARPANET. It promoted DEC's new range of System-20 minicomputers, asking recipients to pop along to a product demonstration.

Hotmail was the first major Web-based email provider, conceptualised by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in 1995, launched in 1996, and bought by Microsoft in 1997 for $400m. The deal is a massive milestone in modern communicative history and extended what was previously only available behind an Internet service provider to any user on any networked computer in the world.

By 2004, Hotmail offered users of its free email service just 2MB of storage, while Yahoo offered 4MB. So when Google announced it was launching a free email service with 1GB of storage, a News.com reader wrote "This sounds like an April Fool's joke if I've ever heard one." In their defence, it was 1 April. But it sparked a paradigm shift in the free email world, with major Web-based email providers now providing gigabytes of storage as standard.