E-mail inventor: I didn't foresee spam - Times Online

at around 7pm one autumn evening in 1971, the first message using Mr Tomlinson's fledgling software, known then as the 'Send Message Program', travelled the short distance of a metre from one computer to a neighbouring machine, and electronic mail was born. Since its beginnings in a computer lab at the offices of a firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, e-mail has become one of the most important communications platforms the world has known, and from the various services available – Yahoo!, Hotmail, and the ubiquitous Outlook – Britons send an estimated three billion messages a day.

read more | digg story