The history of the Email can be told from very different angles. To emphasize the European path, two pathways (and narratives) of the story of electronic communication systems will be zoomed: firstly, one over the history of computing, which is more United States (US) path towards Email and secondly, one over the history of postal and telecommunication services, which is more a European path.
Two pathways to today’s Email
Today’s Email established itself as a form of communication in Europe in the 1980s. Initially widespread in the fields of science, politics and business, Email has become the common European system of communication since the mid-1990s, which replaced traditional letter post as the dominant form of communication after the turn of the millennium. However, Email was not the only Electronic Mail Systems (EMS) that was put into service in connection with the digitization of communication networks. On the contrary, different forms of EMS emerged which had different technical and operational characteristics. One could even speak of a particular European path to the Email, which was shaped by European PTT monopoly structures such as the ‘Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones’ in France or the ‘Deutsche Bundespost’ in Germany and centralized technical systems and services. Both narrative strands – the US and the European one – ultimately end up in the implementation of today's Email, but one begins with electronic communication within small computer networks, while the other has its starting point in national telecommunication networks. The path via the networking of computers can be described as a more US path, while the path via monopole networks was a more European one.
Email as part of computer history: A US story
The first computerized mail systems appeared in the 1960s, using shared files to transmit messages. At that time, different systems of the individual companies stood unconnected next to each other. This was to change with the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) by the US Department of Defense in the second half of the 1960s. In the early 1970s, the first Email service based on the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) was created in the Arpanet, which used the @ sign to separate the local name (name of the sender) from the server name (name and country code of the server).
In the early days of Email, it was also referred to as electronic document transfer or computer-to-computer mail. The term Email only gradually emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was also due to the fact that EMS was a very heterogeneous and new phenomenon that was used within localized, administrative and scientific networks. At that time, hardly anyone could imagine that Email would soon become a communication system for mass use. Email was conceived as a form of communication in smaller units such as companies, scientific communities or administrations.
A strong US computer industry, a fast spread of the personal computer (PC) and the digitization of telecommunications networks, then created the basis on which Email was able to become a means of mass communication. The merger of Email and the internet in the early 1990s and increasingly powerful transmission protocols have meant that more and more devices, including mobile devices such as smartphones, can be used for Email communication. The number of users increased first in the USA and then in Europe.
Electronic mail systems on centralized networks: a more European path
The 'European path' to Email was different. Decisive were the providers of telecommunications networks, mostly national administrations, which obtained a monopole on all devices that were connected to the public telephone network up to the mid 1980s. This also meant that modems for communication between computers could not simply be connected to the telephone network. They either had to be approved by the administration or rented from them. However, the administrations were legally obliged to develop technologies for widespread use throughout the country. EMS were therefore developed incrementally from the existing nationwide networks and perceived as part of a long line of development since the telegraph in the 19th century. Characteristic for these systems were low transmission capacity and low demand by customers, which were about to overcome in the 1970s and 1980s when networks were digitized. A second obstacle was the existing national postal and telecommunications networks. On the one hand, postal transport was organised so efficiently that letters were delivered within 24 hours. On the other hand, the networks for telex systems, which provided text-based message exchange over the public telephone network, were hardly used. The poor utilisation of telex further hampered investment in EMS because it fuelled fears that EMS would not be profitable either.
In Europe, the EMS therefore built on the existing services: regarding telecommunication, improved telex and telematics services, such as those offered by Minitel or Bildschirmtext, and fax technology, were implemented, while hybrid mail systems were taken into operation by postal administrations. Hybrid systems transmitted written messages electronically and then printed out, enveloped and delivered. A bridging technology on the way to Email, hybrid systems like the Intelpost system (ill. 1) were unable to gain a larger market share and were finally abandoned at the end of the 1990s. They were simply too expensive and the gain in time was too small for the average user of postal mail.
The privatisation of the postal and telecommunication administrations and the digitization of networks fundamentally changed the preconditions in the 1990s. With the spread of networked PCs, Email also became established in Europe. It had its heyday between 2005 and 2015, during which it was also responsible for the decline in traditional letter mail – in France, for example, from 25 million letters per day in 2000 to 7.3 million in 2020.
Since the 1970s, more and more EMS have been developed, among which Email finally became the global standard. In Europe, however, this happened more slowly than in the USA, as the computer industry developed differently and the national monopolies led to a different planning and development of EMS. Since the computer industry was able to develop its EMS independently of the obligations and logic of a monopoly company and benefited from the fact that the PC was a success that no one had expected, with a corresponding spread, Email (as computer-to-computer communication) had favorable conditions and became the dominant means of communication in Europe and the World after the turn of the millennium. Since the mid-2010s, however, Email has increasingly been replaced by more informal messaging systems such as WhatsApp. This is also accompanied by a change in the forms of written communication, which are less and less oriented towards traditional letter mail.
