Back in the days when “Attach File” meant finding your stapler…

Who remembers their first email account? Was it Gmail? Googlemail? Yahoo? Hotmail? Pegasus Mail? My first private email account was a Hotmail I set up in 1998 to be able to contact my family and friends while I slummed across Europe, and at the time, that was considered a bold move, committing your precious email details to the World Wide Web. Ah, the heady days of Internet 1.0.

This month, the venerable electronic mail turns forty, with the first verified electronic message being sent in 1971. Email has its origins in the late 1960s when MIT graduate, Ray Tomlinson, experimented with a messaging application on the proto-internet ARPANET, which was mainly used by the US military. His SNDMSG programme allowed messages to be sent to different users on the same computer.

Fast forward forty years, and Tomlinson can’t even remember what that first experimental message said, though he believes it was the letter sequence QWERTY. These days, email is considered a bit cumbersome, what with users preferring IM and social media platforms to stodgy email clients littered with spam.

So while you kick back and hit up iMessage on your iPhone (or, for others, stare sadly at the fail messages on your Blackberry), consider this handy infographic looking back over forty years of email:

[Source: The Next Web, Storify]