What was Doug Engelbarts role in the invention of e-mail?
(Editor’s note: Engelbart is a pioneer in numerous technologies, among them the mouse, display editing, windows and groupware.) The online system he put together had a version of e-mail, though this was a single-computer thing. He also had a role in hypertext. His theme has always been getting people to be able to interact and communicate. And that was part of the online system that he was putting together at SRI. He had a lot of the early ideas there. Can you describe in some technical detail exactly what you devised to send the first e-mail? I had two programs. One was called SNDMSG, which was used for composing messages to be put in the mailbox of another user in a time-shared computer. There were versions of SNDMSG from Berkeley and MIT, but I recoded it. Another program was an experimental FTP program. I wrote a version to act as a server, another to act as a client, to specify what should be transferred, then send the data of the file to the other computer. I took those two progr
