E-mail inventor - I didnt foresee spam

Ray Tomlinson does not recall the contents of the first e-mail that was ever sent. He thinks it was probably QWERTY, or another meaningless set of letters produced swiping one's hand across the top of the computer keyboard.

Whatever it said, 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.