Ben Macintyre you're wrong

Well he's only part wrong to be fair. If you wondering Ben Macintyre is, he's a comment writer in the Times and this morning in he opened his article like this.

"We know what was written in the first telegram, sent by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1844: "What hath God wrought?" We know the words spoken by Alexander Graham Bell when he made the first telephone call in 1876, to his assistant, Thomas Watson: "Mr Watson - come here - I want to see you." (The "polite telephone manner" had not yet been invented.) But we have absolutely no idea what was said in the first e-mail, just 35 years ago.

Actually we do have an idea what was written in the first email and depending on how you define first we even know it exactly. Email was first proposed on July 20th 1971 in RFC 196 and was then developed by Ray Tomlinson for use on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) - this is the network which paved way for we now call the Internet.

During his development he sent test messages which said "QUERTYIOP" and "ASDFGHJK", so if we consider those the "first emails" then we know what was being said. However, if we consider the first email to be one sent to other people whilst we don't have the text we do have an "idea what was written" in it.

The first email announced email to the world. It essentially said, "this is an email you can send messages of ARPANET with it, you have to use the @ character to send to someone such as geeknerd1@station2". It was sent betweent he two machines pictured on the right.

Of course Ben was trying to make a point about digital media not being constant and not actually making paper dead. His argument is that we delete so much these days that digital media was a false promise. Persoanlly, I'd disagree. Only things that people want to delete get deleted, the same as books are disposed of when people choose to dispose of them. There are many archivists out there, some personal, some organisational, you just have to know where to look.