e-mailm@n

The year was 1971. The writer was Ray Tomlinson

The Alexander Graham Bell of e-mail is Ray Tomlinson, and he can't even remember the first message he sent. "It may have been 'QWERTYUIOP,' or just 'TESTING,'" Tomlinson says.

Admittedly, typing 10 consecutive letters on a computer keyboard isn't nearly as dramatic as Bell's "Watson, come here, I need you!" in 1876, but the from of communication that evolved is every bit as far-reaching and revolutionary as the telephone.

"The development of e-mail stands out as a crucial moment in the history of computer-mediated communication," Ian Hardy, a Berkeley cyberhistorian, told me, appropriately enough, in an e-mail message. "Before e-mail, people didn't view computers as tools for talking to one another."

In fact, in 1958, sending instant messages was probably the furthest thing from the minds of the engineers who set up ARPANET, the antecedent of today's Internet. Forget chatting. ARPANET was created by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency in direct response to the Soviet Union's launch the previous year of Sputnik I. The idea was to link computers at remonte sites so massive files could be transferred from one researcher to another.