When was e-mail invented and is it true that it cost money per e-mail that was sent?

Question

Somebody was saying that it used to cost money per e-mail to send it. That doesn't sound right.

Answer 1

Email dates back to the mainframe days in the 1960s. It was used by researchers to communicate with each other. It's always been free - I remember using it in college back in 1987 and it was free back then. There have been persistent rumors of congress trying to pass laws charging for email, and it's also been discussed as a way of discouraging spam, but nobody has any good ideas of how to make it work.

History of email at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email

Answer 2

Electronic mail has actually been around for a long time...try mid 1970s but it wasn't widely used because of the complex computer language needed and the fact that computers just weren't used by everyone. (After all, who wanted to dedicate a whole room of their business to a single computer?) In the 1980s there was still electronic mail but it wasn't refined and yes, it did cost to send it. It wasn't until the 1990s that email became popular with the invention of windows and the start of AOL and the fact that more people had personal computers. At that time you didn't have to pay to send mail but you did have to pay per minute every time you logged onto the internet. It wasn't until 1993 that AOL came out with "unlimited" internet use for a flat monthly fee.

Answer 3

I can't remember the date that it came out. But yes that is true. When e-mail was first around you paid per e-mail that was sent. There were not many people that had it. Really the only people that had it were people that were well off and large businesses.

Answer 4

There was an idea to charge a few cents for e-mail to discourage spam. Hasn't happened yet.

Answer 5

I've been emailing forever, and I've never paid....