On email's 40th anniversary, scientists recall India arrival

Ever since US programmer Ray Tomlinson sent the first email 40 years ago, the new communication tool has taken the world by storm, but it took another 20 years or so to reach the Indian shores, Indian scientists recall.

"In October 1971, Tomlinson wrote a software and was able to transfer a message from one computer to another, making it the first networked email, much before the advent of what we now know as Internet," Sugata Sanyal, former professor of computer science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, said. Tomlinson's 'invention' came while improving a program called SNDMSG, which was in use since 1960s, that allows a user to compose, address, and send a message to other users' mailboxes in a single computer.

The first email, containing a 'forgettable' message, was sent between two computers that were literally side by side with their only physical connection being through the ARPANET, one of the first computer networks of the world.

Sanyal, now Advisor, Corporate Technology Organisation of TCS, said many Indians studying or researching in the US around that time had their first experience with email through ARPANET or the BITNET, a network used to exchange emails by academics of universities across the US.

Rajiv Gavai, professor of the Theoretical Physics Department, TIFR, was one of those Indians. As a post-doctoral fellow in Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, in the early '80s, he used emails of both ARPANET and BITNET to interact with co-authors who were several miles away.

Gavai was so impressed by "the ease of collaborative work, without use of the then expensive fax machines or the too-cryptic telex machines", that he initiated setting up of a similar BITNET-based academic network in India.

"After returning to India in 1986, I tried to continue my collaborative work in the US using airmail or fax, but soon got frustrated, due to the huge time delays," Gavai said. He talked to TIFR colleagues like Professors Sugata Sanyal, K P Singh and N K Mondal about how the academic community in the US was connected to the whole world.

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