The first electronic-mail delivery engaging two machines was done one day in 1972 by a quiet engineer, Ray Tomlinson at BBN. Sometime earlier, Tomlinson had written a mail program for Tenex, the BBN-grown operating system that, by now, was running on most of the ARPANET’s PDP-10 machines. The mail program was written in two parts: To send messages, you’d use a program called SNDMSG; to receive mail, you’d use the other part called READMAIL. He hadn’t actually intended for the program to be used on the ARPANET.
