Evolution of Social Networking

“I’m a student in the History of Computing class at San Jose State University ( http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/CS185C/ ). This is a work in progress that will turn into a final article by the end of the semester. I welcome your comments and advice!”

Object: Computer Application History

What to Discover: The history of social networking, and what the next generation's of social networks might be.

Research Plan: Source includes Comupter History Museum artifacts, IEEE paper and Internet Forum etc. My timeline is to read 5 - 10 paper before mid of October and write rough draft as I read them

1. First E-Mail (1971)

The first email was sent between the two machines sat right next to each other. The only connection between them was the ARPANET (“Advanced Research Projects Agency Network”). APRANET was sponsored and created by the U.S. Depaartment of Defense and later lead to the development of Internet.

"SNDMSG" was a program which can deliver messages by appending to a file on the same computer. It allowed a user to compose, address, and send a message to other users' mailboxes. A mailbox was simply a file with a particular name. At that time, the sender could only append the file, they could not read or overwrite what was already in the mailbox.

"CPYNET" was a file transfer program which writes and reads files on remote compute. Ray Tomlinson decided to incorporate "SNDMSG" with "CPYNET", so the messgae could direct through network connection to remote mailboxes in addition to appending messages to local mailbox files.